Niki's Reviews > With the Fire on High

3,5 stars.

What worked:
*Emoni's family is EVERYTHING. You can *feel* the love between her, her grandmother and her daughter. After so many book moms repeating "my child is everything to me, I'd do anything for them" over and over again, but the author failing to SHOW that and sometimes having them.... not actually care about their children at all, seeing Emoni love Emma so deeply was refreshing as hell. You can feel it, you can see it, it's all right there and it's amazing. 'Buela loves them both and is prepared to do anything for them. Emoni's relationship to her father Julio is more complicated, but you can feel the love there too.
*Emoni's other non-familial relationships are all equally well-written. I wish Angelica and Laura'd been in the book more, but what we did see of them was lovely. Malachi was mostly good, but more on this later. Chef Ayden and the guidance counselor did everything they could to help the students without becoming overbearing or a "tough love" stereotype.
*Every single description of food and cooking was beyond evocative. I wanted to eat and drink everything described. Also loved that cooking was an intuitive act for Emoni; some people really are born like that.
*The Spain portion of the book was one of the best parts for sure. I wish we could've seen even MORE of it, honestly.

What didn't:
The book fell on a bunch of different YA pitfalls.

-Pitfall number 1, "The female protagonist says she's not interested and the guy still pursues her, they end up in a relationship after all because "no" meant "yes, just be more persistent about it"" (Malachi would probably be labelled a creep irl if he kept going after a girl who told him to leave her alone, but here it was okay because Emoni didn't REALLY mean it and he somehow knew it so it was romantic that he persisted!)
-Pitfall number 2, "Whatever is deemed repetitive and boring will just be skipped no matter how important it is to the plot" Namely, the cooking class students working really hard to earn money for the Spain trip by working at the school cafeteria (we didn't SEE any of that and we were only told that it was really tiring etc. and that it all worked out in the end) and the working portions of the Spain trip, that were basically skipped over completely. I mentioned before that I loved everything that had to do with cooking in the book, and I really enjoyed many of the lessons, so I'd have loved to see all the hands-on experience the students were getting.
-Pitfall number 3, "Everything works out perfectly always" (view spoiler)[Emoni needs some more money to go to the Spain trip? Her aunt sends her the amount, she "forgot" to do it earlier just so we'd have a little scare about whether Emoni was going or not. Both Tyrone and Julio do an 180 at the end just so they can help Emoni cope with Emma alone after 'Buela gets a boyfriend (because of course her "Gloria time" was just her getting into a relationship, that's the only way to feel good about yourself, right?) Every single chef that Emoni meets is immediately dazzled and offering her, a literal teenager, a job on the spot. Malachi keeps pursuing her even when she said no just so we'd romantic relationship in the book (you can't have a YA book without romance, right?), because a book about a biracial chef mom working her ass off to do something for her future apparently wasn't compelling enough already, we needed to see her ~fall in love~ too. (hide spoiler)]

I definitely liked this more than The Poet X but I don't think Elizabeth Acevedo's writing is for me.