Sweet Secrets

At seven, Michael gets into trouble no more than any other boy his age but he does have a sweet tooth. When the mailman misdelivers a package from a candy company, the youngster has to sneak just one. As he eats the chocolate, his home, stepfather, and everything he’d known melts around him and disappears. He finds himself in a dreamlike world where he is taken as an orphan, tested, and before he knows it is enrolled as a student in the premier cooking school on the planet. His fellow students can make cookies that fly and chocolate turtles that actually walk. Michael is told he has more cooking magic than any of them.

Brad is charged with watching his stepson Michael for first time. When the boy disappears before his eyes, Brad panics. Within hours he is on an adventure tracking his son alongside an enigmatic chef. Always one step behind his son, Brad soon finds that Michael is being used as a pawn between the two most powerful chefs on the crazy planet. Worse he has to get Michael home before his Mother finds out he’s gone or there is going to be hell to pay.

My Take:

Michael is an independent-thinking seven-year-old who has a talent for cooking with his stepdad Brad. When Brad is asked to watch his new stepson, he doesn't realize just how much trouble the boy could get into when left alone for just one minute.

The postman misdelivers a box of candy to their house, and while Brad is digging up the number to their mysterious new neighbor, to whom the package is actually addressed, Michael opens the package and digs out one of the candy bars.

When Brad comes back into the kitchen he sees Michael taking a bite out of a candy bar, and disappearing right before his eyes. When he confronts the neighbor, he learns that the candy are actually teleporting treats that send the person eating them to the stranger's home in another dimension, one where chefs are magicians and create incredible spells with their culinary masterpieces.

What's worse, Michael had to have talent to activate the treats, and is now in danger of being snatched up in the other dimension as a master magician. To top it all off, Michael has to be returned before Mom gets home, or Brad will have to answer for it... and the truth is an answer that no one would believe.

Content:

Drug Content:

PG - Several scenes in this book include drinking with a meal, none to excess.

Violence:

G - While there are certain veiled threats and some underlying unexplained fear in the top-notch school Michael finds himself in, the prodigy is fairly well treated. And while some bullying is present, it's quickly squashed by a ring of protecting friends.

Language:

PG - I don't recall any swear words at all. I think the stepdad uses the D-word a few times.

Adult Content:

G - Squeaky clean.

Christian content:

Nothing. From a moral standpoint, certain subjects are broached in discussions, like faithfulness, family, and obedience. Pretty clearly depicted are the dangerous consequences of disobedience to parents, and the lengths that a parent, even a step-parent, will go to retrieve a lost child.

Final analysis:

It was an interesting and fun concept, sweets and foods making magic happen. The settings in the book were fun, and fairly well fleshed out. Michael and some of his friends were three dimensional, and Brad had some character shown, though a lot of it was desperation and anger over the frustrating situation he was placed in. I didn't find much deep content to recommend it from a teaching perspective, but it was fairly realistic in setting and action, and it was an interesting adventure, to say the least. Five Stars!

About the Author:

I write because I must. My writing addiction started with a slug.

Okay, I'll explain...

A Local convention held a contest for short stories involving a slug, and I entered just for fun, and found it hard to stop once I started. (Take note kids. This could be YOU!)

I started with stories from the POV of wizard's familiars and even finished two 60,000+ books about them, but found that as I wrote more to build my skills, I wrote about lots of stuff from love stories to dystopias, including magic and space invasions. Fortunately for my sanity, not all in the same tale. lol

My muse is still an intelligent, ok very intelligent (you can retract claws now-thank you), cat.

And if you're not scared away yet, I may be reached at my writing e-mail stephanie.weippert@gmail.com.:D