Pasta Pasta Lotsa Pasta

May 1, 2024
Mangia! Can one ever tire of Italian food? Introducing luscious homemade cuisine! The text is almost an aria, expressed in rollicking verse that not only extols the deliciousness of various types of pasta, but also outlines their construction (from scratch, of course). A pale-skinned child welcomes relatives who arrive one by one from wonderful places that rhyme with their names ("Nonno Tito from Tahiti only eats our spaghettini"). Then everyone creates delicacies such as ravioli, lasagna, and rotini. What a large family! What intricate preparations! What ingredients! Even the pets have their favorites. Finally, the family sits down to the bountiful feast, but Mamma accidentally drops the dishes on her way to serve them. "BASTA!" shouts a frustrated Mamma. But all's not lost. A final ring of the doorbell brings another very welcome visitor, someone who's fortunately carrying boxes containing a substitute Italian repast. Readers will eat this up. Who wouldn't love a book about yummy foods, told in such a delightfully bouncy manner? One quibble: There's no guide to help kids learn to pronounce the food names accurately. Still, the sumptuous foods--long strands of pasta, leaves of basil--pop in the digitally rendered collage illustrations, and Demirağ captures the busy culinary activities of this tightknit, racially diverse family. As delectable as a book can get. Try it. You'll really like it! (Picture book. 5-8)

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Starred review from June 1, 2024
Preschool-Grade 2 *Starred Review* Infectious rhythm, delightfully crowded artwork, and a buoyant story about dinnertime disaster make up Lucido's riotous picture book debut. A family is getting ready for dinner when Nonna Ana (from Catania) arrives, bearing a cart of fresh eggs, and they set about making lasagna, stirring the eggs into the flour, and rolling the dough out "thin as paper." Then, Nonno Titi (from Tahiti) rings the doorbell carrying a bag of zucchini, and the family starts making spaghettini. As more relatives ring the bell, the kitchen gets more and more packed with family members requiring different kinds of pasta--even the parrot, Pokey, has a discerning palette: "Pokey only eats our gnocchi." Demirag's deliciously textured, blocky digital artwork perfectly captures the jostling chaos with overlapping images of ingredients and kitchen tools, as well as aunts, uncles, cousins, several birds, and a cat, all of whom are getting hungrier. But when it's finally time to eat, could there be too much pasta? Lucido's bouncy rhyming lines are a pure joy to read aloud, and an abrupt comic turn at the end that marvelously maintains the rhyme scheme is sure to leave little ones hungry for repeat reads (and pasta). A playful pick, superb for group story time.

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