Mindy’s grandmother has just passed, and now she and her dad have moved into the old family farmhouse in Oglesby. To make things worse, Mindy is also transferred from her fancy private school to the Korn Wotel School, the local public school housed in a converted motel. The transition is rough, but the upcoming Fall Carnival is a chance to have fun and make friends—especially using her handy engineering skills to design an imaginative carnival game.
The overall structure of Laura Pashley’s DODGING CUPCAKES is straightforward: Mindy must design an exciting game for the looming Fall Carnival while negotiating the struggle of being the new kid at school. DODGING CUPCAKES is a mid-grades book, and it does an excellent job of constructing an appealing, relatable 7th-grade protagonist who deals with serious life challenges. Mindy undergoes a subdued, complex grieving process as she leaves behind her old life and inhabits her grandmother’s now-empty farmhouse. The urban/rural divide is explicitly class-conscious: with a preppy style informed by her old private school, Mindy is visibly out-of-place and uncomfortable amidst the poorer public-school crowd. (This theme is further complicated by the fact that Mindy’s dad is a contractor who attended the school in his youth.) The treatment of gender is similarly nuanced: Mindy’s interest and skills in engineering are both driving forces in the plot, as well as important foils to her male counterpart’s interest in baking. Altogether, this thoughtful development of multiple thematic strains lays successfully over the conventional plot (and unconventional setting), creating a stronger overall product.
Mindy’s character and her emotional journey are the primary draws in DODGING CUPCAKES, as the plot has few surprises and largely trucks along to its expected conclusion. The other characters are one-note bit players. Principal Caster, for example, has several costume changes, but there’s little sense of underlying character. The text misses a few opportunities with the setting, as well. The idea of the Korn Wotel School is a funny one, for instance—a former motel converted into a school, with a semi-detached old-style diner as a cafeteria—but the physical realities of the setting are rarely described and never affect the narrative. The prose itself is uncomplicated, neither troubled by too many technical errors nor aided by any stylistic flair. Not every narrator has to be Lemony Snicket, but a more active, descriptive mode might better highlight the appealing weirdness of the Korn Wotel School and the townsfolk of Oglesby.
There is definitely room to grow in DODGING CUPCAKES, tinkering with storytelling decisions and prose (including resolving some typos and tense-shifting errors). However, its smart, relatable, and recognizably flawed protagonist is overall enough to make the book worth reading.
Laura Pashley’s DODGING CUPCAKES heartily tackles serious and relatable elements of being the new kid at school.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader