Pizza, Love, and Other Stuff That Made Me Famous by Kathryn Williams

Sophie Nicolaides has grown up in the kitchen of her family's Greek-Italian restaurant.  Sophie dreams of becoming a chef, and she might get her chance sooner than she thought when she enters to compete on a reality TV teen cooking contest.   But the contest is not what Sophie was expecting.  Is having her life exposed worth the possible reward?

This was fast, fun and sweet.  It's good to have nice books.  Nothing terrible happens, nothing overly sexy besides a few kisses.  A little bit of friendship and relationship drama and it all ends happily.  Delightful!

Sophie wants to have a real restaurant, not a family restaurant like her father owns.  Sophie wants to be a chef, not just a cook.  This is something that her father doesn't really understand.  Sticking with family means everything to him, and he doesn't understand why Sophie would want something different.

Sophie has a crush on (of course) her best guy friend Alex.  But when she goes to Napa for the competition at the National Culinary Academy she meets a dashing French student named Luc who gets her all confused!  What's a girl to do?  It doesn't help, of course, that Sophie's every move is being filmed and broadcast.

Sophie and her fellow competitors are shocked, shocked when they realize they're being manipulated by the show's producers to heighten the drama.  Come on kids, have you never seen a reality TV show?  Surely you didn't believe that's all happening naturally?  Do you?  This is why we need to teach media literacy, folks.

I think this would be a great pick for a middle school girl who liked books like The Tea Shop Girls or The Mother-Daughter Book Club.

I am NOT pleased to see that covers where the girl's head is cut off are making a comeback.


Pizza, Love, and Other Stuff That Made Me Famous comes out August 21, 2012.