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    All Four Stars: All Four Stars, Book 1
    All Four Stars: All Four Stars, Book 1
    All Four Stars: All Four Stars, Book 1
    Audiobook6 hours

    All Four Stars: All Four Stars, Book 1

    Written by Tara Dairman

    Narrated by Kathleen McInerney

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Meet Gladys Gatsby: New York’s toughest restaurant critic. (Just don’t tell anyone that she’s in sixth grade.)

    Gladys Gatsby has been cooking gourmet dishes since the age of seven, only her fast-food-loving parents have no idea!

    Now she’s eleven, and after a crème brûlée accident (just a small fire), Gladys is cut off from the kitchen (and her allowance). She’s devastated, but soon finds just the right opportunity to pay her parents back when she’s mistakenly contacted to write a restaurant review for one of the largest newspapers in the world.

    But to meet her deadline and keep her dream job, Gladys must cook her way into the heart of her sixth-grade archenemy and sneak into New York City—all while keeping her identity a secret.

    Easy as pie, right?

    ©2014 Tara Dairman (P)2016 Ideal Audiobooks

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIdeal Audiobooks
    Release dateMay 10, 2016
    ISBN9781942907251
    All Four Stars: All Four Stars, Book 1

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    Reviews for All Four Stars

    4/5

    54 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I read this as a part of a book club with my niece it was adorable and still entertaining as an adult. Absolutely recommend it
    • 4/5
      ‘Gladys took a bite of her brownie, and a slew of flavors flooded her taste buds. The sweet, melty butterscotch offset the bitterness of the chocolate, and the hint of nutmeg gave the whole thing a kick.’Gladys Gatsby is a sixth grader that loves nothing more than experimenting in the kitchen. From entrées to pastries, she loves cooking anything and everything. During her latest kitchen experiment involving crème brûlée and a blowtorch, her family’s kitchen curtains went up in smoke and her family finally put a stop to her kitchen shenanigans. When she enters a writing contest in school, her entry ends up in the hands of the Dining Editor at a prestigious New York newspaper and she’s offered a job as a food critic. Keeping it a secret from her family while still completing her assignment is starting to seem to Gladys like an impossibility.‘…tender duck breast swimming in a lake of tea-infused gravy, with a side of slender asparagus stalks dipping their tips in at the shore.’Readers will fall in love with precocious Gladys. Her parents prefer take out, rarely using their kitchen, so Gladys never knew what good food truly tasted like. Her eyes were opened to good food when her Aunt Lydia, visiting from France, took her into the city to show her what a real restaurant is. From that point on she started keeping track of her food experiences (including the bad ones) in a journal. The descriptions of her family’s attempts at cooking were hilarious and cringe-worthy but her descriptions at her more positive food experiences will have you salivating.‘Their flavors will send your taste buds on a trip around the world: the Moroccan cake features pistachio and cardamom, the Chinese cake has green tea and sesame seeds, and the Belgian cake has chocolate and… well, more chocolate.’All Four Stars was completely worth all four stars. This endearing middle grade story will have your taste buds dancing. Much of the story is spent on Gladys’ use of subterfuge in keeping her parents from finding that she’s still cooking (sans blowtorch) but the rest of the pages are full of delectable descriptions of delicious foods that will have you reaching for something tasty to munch on so having something on hand may be wise.
    • 4/5
      If her parents had given her the minitorch Gladys Gatsby asked last Christmas she wouldn’t have set the kitchen curtains on fire with her father’s blow torch while making crème brulee. But her parents – who think microwaving tater tots is cooking, and prefer fast food takeout in any case – just don’t understand their daughter’s obsession with food and cooking. When her teacher assigns an essay on “my future” Gladys writes about how she wants to be a restaurant critic. Somehow that essay gets to the food editor for the New York Standard, who thinks it is written by an adult, and Gladys suddenly has a freelance assignment to write a review of New York’s hottest new dessert bistro. She only has to figure out how to sneak into the city and sample enough cakes, pies, tarts and custards to write a good review.

      What a scrumptious debut! Gladys is a bright, resourceful, tenacious girl who will not let a few setbacks (like being grounded and not having any money) thwart her plans to succeed. Taking first her next door neighbor into her confidence and then her school friend Parm (who couldn’t be more different, since she eats nothing but cold cereal with milk and plain spaghetti), Gladys devises first one and then another plan to get into the city to sample the restaurant’s wares so she can write her first professional review.

      I did think Gladys’s parents were a little over the top; they were more than clueless about their daughter’s talents and wishes, and seemed completely self-absorbed. Her school nemesis – Charissa – was little more than a cardboard stereotype for much of the book. And while I was pleased to see how inventive Gladys was in formulating her final plan, I was sorry to see her use Charissa as she did. On the other hand, I liked how Dairman showed friends who were NOT cookie-cutter duplicates of one another, but appreciated each other’s different talents and interests.

      And, I absolutely loved Gladys, and the descriptions of the foods she ate or prepared. I gobbled this delectable treat down in less than a day, and was hungry for more.
    • 5/5
      All Five Stars!! Review to follow on blog as well as author/interview and tour stop in July!