(++++) SOMEWHAT SCRUMPTIOUS

Every Cake Has a Story. By Christina Tosi. Illustrated by Emily Balsley. Dial. $17.99.

Deliciously FoxTrot. By Bill Amend. Andrews McMeel. $18.99.

     With its super-simple message, a clever illustrative twist, and a yummy recipe included, Christina Tosi’s Every Cake Has a Story has many of the ingredients needed for a delicious picture book. However, it is really suitable only for the very youngest readers, or even pre-readers, because it is missing…well…a story. The book opens on Samesday in Samesville, where all the houses look alike and everything is black and white and gray and the only cake is vanilla. The reason is – well, there is no reason. Really young children will likely accept this, although at some point even the youngest may wonder why things are this way. Tosi does not explain – but Balsley’s black-and-white-and-gray pictures certainly make the setup clear. The book’s protagonist is a girl named Sammi, whose name almost sounds like “same,” which is the opposite of Tosi’s intent. Sammi puts a recipe card under her pillow one night and, lo and behold, dreams in color (shades of The Wizard of Oz) and awakes to find her card transformed into a cookbook “full of cakes and colors, and ingredients she’d never seen.” So, all right, there is a magical transformation here, because – well, there is no “because.” Magic does not really require a “because,” but this transformation turns out to have affected everything, because the houses and yards and people and activities and animals and streets are all now different-looking and in full color. Again, Balsley’s art smooths the non-explanatory awkwardness of the narrative. The next thing that happens is that Sammi calls out to everyone to come home with her to bake a cake, so everyone does, and now somehow all the “ingredients she’s never seen” are right there in her kitchen, and Sammi and all the other kids know exactly what they are (strawberries, pretzels, cereal, peanut butter, marshmallows) and how they can be mixed into a cake. A list on the wall, which is never explained, has the words “glitter, gummy bears, balloons” – hopefully not all as cake ingredients, but who knows? Tosi is surely aware that in real life, cake ingredients must be compatible and must be mixed carefully and in correct proportions, but there is none of that in Every Cake Has a Story – somehow Sammi just puts everything together and, voila, the result is delicious and delightful and “things would NEVER be the same again.” Adults had better be ready to explain to young readers that this is not how cakes are made and that, in fact, baking requires careful attention to amounts and proportions, although there is something magical about doing all the mixing and combining and ending up (after careful preparation and carefully controlled baking time) with a finished product that looks very different from its component parts. Tosi ends the book with a recipe for “Dreamy Strawberry Frosting” that is easy to follow but does require just the right amounts of ingredients, mixed the right way for the correct amount of time – in other words, the opposite of what happens in Sammi’s world. Every Cake Has a Story is pleasant enough, and Balsley’s pictures help overcome its lack of any actual plot, but it does feel as if one ingredient is missing here: a clear narrative.

     Not everything is yummy in Deliciously FoxTrot, either, but this latest collection of cartoons by Bill Amend does not lack for continuity: each individual episode is unconnected to others, true, but the characters and their interactions have been around since Amend started FoxTrot back in 1988. Since the start of 2007, the strip has appeared only on Sundays, which means that to assemble enough FoxTrot sequences for a book takes something more than two years – a fact that makes Deliciously FoxTrot a feast for comic-strip gourmands. However, the strip has lost most of its topicality since becoming a Sunday-only offering – deadlines for Sunday strips are about a month in advance, limiting real-world references – and Amend has fallen back perhaps a bit too much on the “nerd” and “video game” elements that were always part of FoxTrot but were never as prominent as they have become in recent years. At times, Amend does a good job of bridging the gap between those who understand nerd culture and the rest of the world, as when ultra-nerd Jason (the youngest of the three Fox kids) develops “loot boxes” to sell and needs to explain to Peter (the oldest) just what they are before Amend can get to his punchline. At other times, Amend is a bit more obscure, as when he has Jason do “UFO Math” by calculating the area of a flying-saucer-shaped drawing and determining that its area is 51 (“area 51” being a place in Nevada long associated with possible alien encounters – something that this strip does not explain). A number of the FoxTrot strips work without requiring readers to have any special knowledge, such as one in which middle child Paige gets upset upon realizing that her class schedule of social studies, theater, art, biology, math and English has first letters that spell out “Stab Me.” And there are periodic forays into traditional comic-strip territory, such as comments on father Roger being overweight (he has never looked that way, but apparently everyone, including Roger himself, is concerned about it): in one strip, mom Andrea (Andy) refuses to let Roger get away with comparing himself to football players who weigh 300 pounds or more. And there are kid-interaction strips, too, such as one in which Peter counts from “one squirt of mayonnaise” up to “five squirts of mayonnaise” on his sandwich, only to be told by Paige that “that’s not what Cinco de Mayo means.” Amend does occasionally manage to do a strip mixing “nerd” and “silly” elements effectively, such as a two-panel one that first shows a detailed mathematical analysis of loop-the-loop construction, concluding that the largest possible loop would be 4/5 the starting height – and then shows Jason and best friend Marcus finishing building the loop as an out-of-panel voice asks why there is a Hot Wheels car “soaking in a bowl of olive oil” (because the calculations assume no friction). Not everything in FoxTrot will appeal to everyone, especially since the Sunday-only format creates limitations not shared with strips that appear all week; but there is certainly enough fun in Deliciously FoxTrot to make it a hearty helping of humor, if perhaps more of a generous snack than a full meal.