Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I want you to imagine the most amazing stuffed peppers you can–fresh, perfectly ripe peppers, stuffed with cheesy, savory goodness, baked to perfection and served on lovely dishes in good company.

I loathe stuffed peppers. When I was a kid, I would save the filling for last–I enjoyed the filling–and grimly eat my way through pieces of the outside pepper first, hating every bite. (Sometimes I took a nibble of the filling in the middle of eating the pepper, just to fortify myself and remind me of the light at the end of the tunnel.) As an adult, I can intellectually understand the appeal of a perfectly crunchy, slightly sweet raw red bell pepper, and I periodically cut them up for some of my kids, but whichever taste bud makes bell peppers appealing rather than appalling did not make it into my mouth.

The Last Cuentista is a darn near perfect stuffed pepper. The writing is lovely, the suspense grows and has you on the edge of your seat by the end, and what could be better than a book that emphasizes the importance of story? The filling, in short, is fabulous. My problem is that I still don’t like bell peppers–or, in this case, dystopian sci-fi. I don’t just not prefer it in comparison to other sorts of fiction; I actively dislike dystopian anything, and I can only handle sci-fi if the emphasis is on the characters and the story rather than the sci-fi-ness of the setting. (I did, for example, enjoy Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.) I love Petra–I admire her bravery and I felt the pain of her loss–and her story is a great one; I’m also thrilled that The Last Cuentista won the Newbery Medal, because its genre is definitely underrepresented in the Newbery canon. It just took me, personally, half the book before I was engaged enough for it not to feel like pulling teeth to read. The fact that I more or less enjoyed the second half is an incredible testament to Donna Barba Higuera and her storytelling; if you even occasionally like dystopian fiction and/or sci-fi, you should absolutely read this book. As for me, well–it impressed and moved me, but still.

Stuffed peppers.