The Sweetest Thing by Christina Mandelski

Sheridan Wells is known around town and by her classmates as Cake Girl because she spends more time in her family bakery decorating cakes than hanging out and being social. Her mom also had a great gift for cake baking, but she has been gone for many years, having abandoned Sheridan and her father for another man.

Sheridan still hasn't gotten over the sting of her mom leaving, especially since she and her dad seem to be growing further and further apart. Now her father, a well-known and highly respected chef, has been offered his own TV show and must move to New York to take the job. Sheridan, convinced her mother will soon return for her, refuses to go with him and even manages to come up with a scheme to find her mother and convince her to come back before her father leaves for New York.

The Sweetest Thing was a roller-coaster ride of a novel. Sheridan is quite the persistent little protagonist, and by midway through the novel, gets to be persistent to the point of delusional. Her compulsion to find her mother is so strong that it gets to be irritating. But I'm sure that was all by design so you can see her growth by the end.

I enjoyed the food and baking aspect of this novel for obvious reasons, but I felt there was a tiny flaw in the logic of the plot. The network that wants to hire Sheridan's dad is insistent that he move to New York in order to make his reality food show. What I don't understand is, if he's making a reality show, why can't he just stay where he is? Wouldn't it be more realistic for him as a well-known chef to stay at his restaurant and do the show from his home town? Plus, having watched Food Network almost incessantly for the past six years, I can tell you that not all their talent lives in New York. It is helpful to live in NYC, but it is not  a deal breaker if you don't. Melissa D'Arabian who won Next Food Network Star lives in Seattle and flies in to NYC to tape all the episodes for one season of her show in a matter of days. Paula Deen films her show in her very own kitchen in Savannah, Georgia. So if this fictional network is so insistent that Sheridan's dad move to New York, I want to know why because not all celebrity chefs in real life do.

And yes, I know I'm being nit-picky since this is fiction and not real life, but still. It was just one of those things that bothered me personally. If you don't have Food Network on in the background 24/7 like I do (Heck, I have it on right now as I write this!), then something little like that will probably go by unnoticed. As for me, it's the one thing that held me back from absolutely loving this novel.

The major aspect of the novel that I enjoyed was watching Sheridan's impression of her father morph and grow. When we first meet her father, the reader is led to believe that he's a jerk who cares little for his daughter and only about his growing career. This is where the unreliable first-person narrator comes into play because the more her father is in the novel, the more you see that unreliable narrator facade start to crack. 

Overall impression? A really enjoyable page-turning debut that that kept me engaged and entertained the entire time. There was never a point in the novel where I felt a lull in the plot, which in this case was good and bad. It was good because it kept me turning the pages, but it was bad because it did make for a bit of a  predictable plot. The reason being is that as you slowly wend your way inside the story, you start to see that every scene clearly is important to the outcome of a future scene and when that happens, you start making easy predictions as to why the author put that scene in the book. Still, the story had great closure and Sheridan shows some definite growth by the end. Plus for YA, it was a wholesome story that would be a great gateway book to move those younger kids who are ready into YA lit.

The Sweetest Thing by Christina Mandelski
Published: May 2011 by Egmont
Pages: 352
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Audience: Young Adult/Middle Grade