Yesterday I had my Tween Book Club. We read PIE by Sarah Weeks. I was lucky enough to get the ARC at BEA, and I reviewed it awhile ago. This is a really cute mystery that also makes you hungry for pie, as it has a yummy pie recipe at the end/beginning of each chapter.

I had 7 kids and one mom in attendance. We had a total of 4 apple pies (1 homemade by one of the girls in the group – so good!) and 1 chocolate cream pie. Obviously, we should have coordinated! We polished off the cream pie and almost 2 apple pies while we talked about the book. Most of them really liked it, while a couple hadn’t finished yet. They seemed to not be all that interested in it. It isn’t the most exciting book maybe, but out of the kids who did read it, they really loved the setting, the characters, the fat cat named Lardo, and most especially, the PIE! One girl asked to renew the book a second time so she could make 2 of the pie recipes for friends.

We discussed some themes in the book: friendship, loss, family relationships. We also talked about characterization, mostly the difference between flat and round characters and why both are important in a novel. They had some great insights. They also had a lot of pie, and therefore a lot of SUGAR. I did manage to get them to vote on the December book before I lost them to the sugar rush, and they chose The Tilting House by Tom Llewellyn. I also have this ARC, but I haven’t read it yet. From what we read on the back of my copy, it sounds pretty interesting. Looking forward to reading it! I just hope there’s some good food in it – it’ll be hard to top PIE for that!

Click the link below for Sarah Weeks’s blog. It has the first chapter of PIE and a link to an interview with Sarah about the book. (This was helpful for my discussion questions, especially since the book just came out and there isn’t much online about it.)

http://www.sarahweeks.com/sweeks-pie.htm