Eliza, from Scratch

Gr 9 Up–Eliza is a star student, poised to become salutatorian at her high school with dreams of going off to MIT in the fall. What she doesn’t expect is ending up in Culinary Arts instead of AP Physics and how that could derail her perfectly planned senior year. Now, instead of the grade boost she was expecting, she must struggle through a class where she doesn’t have the first clue how to begin anything. Worst of all, she gets paired with smug expert chef Wesley for a group project. She begins taking lessons from her mother to learn her late grandmother’s Korean recipes to try to beat him in the end-of-semester cook-off and repair her relationship with her mother, who’s still grieving Eliza’s grandmother. Meanwhile, it feels like her best friends are drifting further away. To make it through the year, Eliza must figure out her true passions and realize that there’s no one true way to success, even though she and her friends believed that their entire lives. Eliza’s dealing with so much going on at once: a newly grieving mother, a class she’s unexpectedly struggling in, friendships changing and evolving, and first love. In her debut novel, Lee presents a character who doesn’t handle it all with grace, but who takes accountability, learning and growing over the course of the school year. Eliza is Korean American, Wesley is Thai American.