The Pie Contest: A Story with a Recipe

PreS-Gr 3—Sophie enters a strawberry pie, made with her grandma's secret ingredient, into the farmer's market pie contest. After delivering the pie to the contest coordinator, the minutes until the tasting drags on for the young girl. Even picking out tomatoes with her mom—which she always loves to do—becomes a chore. Predictably, her pie is the junior category winner. At the secret ingredient's grand reveal, Sophie proudly declares it's "love." Wilcke misses an opportunity to pull in would-be pastry chefs by skipping the fun of the actual pie-making until the last page. Karron's illustrations are as creative as the text. The characters' facial features are all disturbingly similar with a limited repertoire of emotions. If variations in skin tone are intended to distinguish race and/or ethnicity in this bilingual book with Latinx protagonists, they are nonexistent. An odd aside in the recipe instructions adds to the peculiar resonance of this ineffectual shoutout for farmer's markets: "Sophie makes this pie with her grandma, and they use a stove, so she asked her mom to help her." Why does she need her mom if Grandma's helping, and why is her grandmother never portrayed if they make the pie together?