Hot Lunch Book

Molly Ollinger can't stand perky Cassie Birchmeyer. When they are forced to collaborate on a school project, their bickering escalates into a food fight in the Sunshine Day School cafeteria. But because Sunshine Day isn't your average high school, the girls' punishment isn't detention—it's to work in the cafeteria as lunch ladies. Ewww. They'll have to cook up a way to get along in order to get themselves out of the kitchen. Seasoned with hilarious original songs, slams on traditional school-lunch menus, not to mention downright tasty recipes, Hot Lunch is the best thing to hit school lunch since Tater Tots.

KLIATT

Molly and Cassie pair up for an assignment at the Sunshine Day High School and good things do not come from the pairing. Molly is sarcastic and a loner; Cassie oozes friendship and positive attitude, and in the first of many fights, the two throw food and disrupt the cafeteria. As an opportunity to adjust their attitude, the principal, a former hippie, assigns the girls to the cafeteria where they are to work together. Once they can achieve five days of satisfactory results on the student survey they will be done with the duty. Unfortunately, the original food fight only gets them started and the fact that they both have a crush on the same boy doesn't help the lunch menus. They don't work well together and the cafeteria supervisor takes early retirement, moving the girls from assistants to top management. How hard can opening a few cans be? But the girls make things decidedly worse before they learn that food preparation takes effort and attention. First, though, they work hard to humiliate each other and then are tricked into using deception to win over the principal. However, with the help of a fellow student Clyde, who finds a talent for pastries, the girls step up to the challenge and to the start of a true friendship. There is a light-hearted, High School Musical quality to the novel but the lessons learned and a few recipes shared make this an entertaining read.