Violet and the Pie of Life

by Debra Green

There's no golden ratio for a family, despite what number-crunching Violet might think.

Twelve-year-old Violet has two great loves in her math and pie. And she loves her parents, even though her mom never stops nagging and her dad can be unreliable. Mom plus Dad doesn't equal perfection. Still, Violet knows her parents could solve their problems if they just applied simple math.

#1: Adjust the ratio of Mom's nagging to her compliments.
#2: Multiply Dad's funny stories by a factor of three.
#3: Add in romantic stuff wherever possible.

But when her dad walks out, Violet realizes that the odds do not look good. Why can't her parents get along like popular, perfect Ally's parents? Would it be better to have no dad at all, like her best friend, McKenzie? Violet is considering the data when she and Ally get cast in the school play, and McKenzie doesn't--a probability that Violet never calculated. Maybe friendship and family have more variables than she thought.

Filled with warmth, math-y humor, and delicious pie, this heartfelt middle grade read is perfect for fans of The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl . Includes illustrated charts, graphs, and diagrams throughout.

Genres: Middle Grade, Realistic Fiction, Mathematics, Contemporary, Childrens, Family, Friendship

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Darla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Violet is trying to make sense of her life using pie charts, graphs, and flow charts. The many ways used to incorporate math and logic into the narrative are clever and engaging. Even though Violet is not as outgoing as her bestie Makenzie, she tries out for a part in the school production of 'The Wizard of Oz.' She gets the part of the lion and finds that her preparation for the show helps her become less of a cowardly lion in her own life. Includes themes of parenting styles, a parent's absence, friendship, and performance anxiety. The anecdotes about the dress rehearsal and show night are a hoot.

Thank you to Holiday House and Edelweiss+ for a DRC in exchange for an honest review.

[Reading_ Tamishly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very confused growing up characters; separating parents; grief; and assuming adults.

The writing is good. However, I feel the book could be still shorter.

My favourite character would be the mom. Though she made mistakes in making her child understand about the separation and covering it with lies about the father, she made up for it in a way the child could understand.

Contrast to what we believe, which is even more difficult in real life, it is always better to let go of toxic people or people who do not give a damn about their families.

A good read for beginners as well as for contemporary lovers.

[Mae Respicio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ADORED this warm, funny book, written in a pitch-perfect middle grade voice! It hits on all the things I would have loved as a young reader: evolving friendships, first crushes, tough family dynamics, and a girl exploring her world.

[Afoma (Reading Middle Grade) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Violet and the Pie of Life is a realistic portrayal of the impact of parental separation on a child. This book also centers musical theater, a math-loving protagonist, and evolving friendships. I would highly recommend this book to fans of voice-driven stories that handle tough topics like parental neglect, parental drug use (briefly mentioned with regard to a side character) while providing levity in form of humor and a school play.

Read my full review on my blog.

Many thanks to the publisher for an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Frankenstrat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is fantastic. Green knocks it out of the park on so many different levels. Wow. My jaw was on the floor.

First, Green displays her skill as a writer by showing us who the parents really are despite our somewhat unreliable narrator (unreliable through first two thirds of novel anyway). How Green portrays the dad and the mom is so beautifully nuanced, and we feel for everyone who is caught in the messes of their lives (the dad less so!), including the other characters like Mackenzie, Ally, etc.

Some of the MG books I read have what I call "fake conflicts." They're kind of forced issues to me, not really compelling, realistic emotional conflicts between people. But all the issues Green portrays in the novel are spot-on and wonderfully depicted. Each of the many different conflicts in the novel wring your heart out.

Humor. So many MG novels creak and wobble under the strain of trying to be funny. You can often feel the author coming a mile off with "OK, here's a line of hilarity a comin' round the bend." But Violet's humor was so natural and smooth and organic. I never felt the strain. Her secret crush was pretty darn funny too (I'm going to file a suit" HA!). Yet, she had some great lines. Also, her situational humor came through so skillfully. A scene with a goth girl in the bathroom was brilliant, and just the right touch so it wasn't overdone. 

Finally, I have such respect with how Green handled delicate subjects like race and M's mom, and her decisions on how to resolve the various issues are worth studying if anyone wants to write for kids. V's mom subtly "adopting" M rather than face off with the mom was a perfect solution and quite realistic. Loved that she was teaching real estate to M. 

I seriously rate this as one of my all-time fave MG novels for skillfully balancing humor and heart. I'm recommending it to writer friends for study, frankly. 

I hope it wins awards in 2021. It deserves to.

[Alex Baugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seventh grader Violet Summers, 12, has always thought of her dad as a fun, loosey-goosey free spirit and her mom as a nagging, work driven spoil sport. And to make matters worse, they have been fighting much more than usual. Then, one day, Violet's dad moves out without much of a good-bye and goes radio silent. Meanwhile, at school, Violet's best friend McKenzie Williston talks her into auditioning for the school play The Wizard of Oz. McKenzie really wants to play Dorothy, but is cast as a monkey instead. Violet lands the part as the Lion, and the part of Dorothy goes to Ally Ziegler. Beautiful, talented, biracial Ally happens to be Violet and McKenzie's arch enemy (though Ally is completely unaware of this). McKenzie tries to talk Violet into quitting the play with her, but Violet decides she wants to do it.

With her father gone, tension between Violet and her mom increases. Violet is sure that if her mom hadn't nagged so much, her father would have stayed. And she is hoping that attending her play will bring her parents together and they can become a whole family again. But the more her dad doesn't respond to her calls and texts, the angrier Violet gets at her mom.

As rehearsals begin for the play, Violet and McKenzie start to drift away from each other. Soon, Violet is eating lunch with Ally and her friends and she discovers that Ally doesn't have the picture perfect life that she and McKenzie always believed she had.

As Violet's life unfolds, readers also learn about McKenzie's life. Her father had passed away years earlier, and her mother believes in free range parenting, which really amounts to plain old neglect. Her clothes are old and worn, but she had always found comfort in her sleepovers at Violet's house, and gets along well with her mother. Ironically, Mrs. Summers is the stable adult in McKenzie's life. She's is a real estate agent and, unlike Violet, McKenzie is interested in what she does, so Mrs. Summer's is beginning to teach her all about that business.

Parents separating is always hard on the children who inevitably believe it is their fault. Violet's father, who appeared to be a free spirit at first, really is just selfish and immature, behaving more like a spoiled child than a grown man. Her mother does come across as a nag, but as readers get to know her, they will see she is really a caring person who only wants the best for both Violet and McKenzie.

Violet struck me as quite bratty at first, but she does change over the course of the novel. At first, she lets rehearsals and her father take up so much of her time that she begins to fall behind in school. Luckily, her math teacher is perceptive and quickly realizes that Violet is a math wiz and gives her a special math packet that is more challenging. In fact, one of the ways Violet deals with things in her life is by putting them into graphs, charts and other mathematical diagrams all through the novel.

The real takeaway from Violet and the Pie of Life is that while math problems always work out just as they should, life doesn't but it does make for an interesting, engaging coming of age novel.

This book is recommended for readers age 10+

[Caitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a digital review copy through Edelweiss.

Twelve-year-old Violet views the events in her world as math problems: conflicts that pi, charts, and calculations can solve. When it comes to her parents’ arguments, she uses math to graph the number and intensity of fights per month, and a division calculation to show how they actually do more things than just nag and complain. Math makes Violet feel calm, even when she’s dealing with the recent absence of her father who left her and her mother, grasping onto the strands of a tumultuous friendship, and navigating middle school. The pages include drawings of equations, graphs, and flow charts that make Violet’s love of math more relatable to readers. These details also make the plot’s problems clearer for visual readers and learners. Violet teaches readers what to do when they’re feeling awkward around new friends, such as asking to sit with a new group of friends in the cafeteria. It’s a story of broken homes, imperfect friendships, the stress of a school play, and exploring new relationships. When readers first meet Violet, she’s tolerating her parents’ constant bickering, but by the end she understands that she can thrive in a world where she and others are allowed to make mistakes and learn.

Green creates incredible social dynamics between characters (Violet and her parents, Violet and her mother, Violet and McKenzie, and others), but I wish Violet and her father's relationship had been more developed. Readers see a great scene with the two of them at the start of the novel when they're getting ready to eat dinner, and Violet shares memories of her and her father, but his leaving seems uncharacteristic of the one we're introduced to. I would have enjoyed his presence in the story a little while longer, if only to better understand his perspective of leaving his daughter and wife.

As a side note, I did not want to stop reading and put this novel down! I thought about the story and the characters until I was able to go back and start reading it again.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a perfect middle grade novel. Violet is upset about her dad moving out and blames her mom. She's trying out for a play at school, but feels bad when her best friend McKenzie doesn't get a part, while Violet is cast as the Lion in The Wizard of Oz. She finds herself making new friends yet worrying about how McKenzie will feel about her having more than one friend. As the story unfolds, Violet starts to realize that there's more to everything than what she initially thought- some of it good, some of it not. I loved this book and Violet. I'd love to check in with her again sometime.

[Ana(stasia) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very good. I loved all of the characters, especially Ally, Violet, McKenzie, Diego, Zahara, and Violet's mother. I liked how Ally ended up being really nice, despite what the girls-particularly McKenzie- though before. As the book went on, and Violet's dad decided that he needed to be free of his responsibilities for a while, I stopped liking him. You are a father. You can't be rid of that responsibility.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one's a 3.5 for me, and I can certainly think of several middle graders who would love this book and maybe even see parts of themselves in it. Twelve-year-old Violet Summers has always felt closer to her father than her mother. While her father is more carefree and prone to rule-breaking and impulsivity, her mother does things by the book, and recently, Violet has noticed an escalation in their arguments. After a fierce disagreement that starts over a bucket of fried chicken, her father disappears, leaving his whereabouts up in the air. Violet is confused and tries to use logic to understand what's going on. She's also somewhat preoccupied about tryouts for parts in the school musical, The Wizard of Oz, which she agrees to attend to support her best friend, McKenzie Williston who desperately wants the starring role. But McKenzie does not win the part of Dorothy, which goes to popular Ally Ziegler, someone McKenzie hates. She and Violet have spent many hours trashing the girl. To McKenzie's surprise, Violet is cast as the Cowardly Lion. While Violet has plenty of doubts that she'll be up to the role, something happens when she is on stage, and with help from the other actors and the director, Mr. Goldstein, Violet starts to feel more at home there than she ever expected. She also finds herself drawn to Ally, who isn't at all the way she thought she was and whose "perfect" home life isn't quite what Violet has thought it was. And Violet becomes increasingly alienated from McKenzie because her friend is less supportive than might be expected. She even wants Violet to quit the play because McKenzie didn't get a big role. Through all the preparation for the play, Violet continues to wonder about her father's whereabouts, and once the truth emerges, she finds it hard to forgive him. His true colors emerge gradually, and Violet must reconcile the man she thought he was with the person he actually is. There is also a budding romance between Violet and Diego, another student actor, and some drama offstage related to her math teacher Ms. Merriweather who realizes that Violet is adept at math despite not paying attention in class and doodling. She assigns more challenging work to Violet to stave off boredom. In addition to the honest depiction of a parental relationship bending and finally fracturing and the carelessness of one of the individuals, this book contains nifty flowcharts, charts, graphs, and Venn diagrams created by Violet to express herself or to come to some understanding of the problems in her life. I wish there had been even more of those in the last half of the book because they add to the book's appeal. The pie mentioned in the book's title can refer to the different types of pie Violet enjoyed eating--and I wish there had been a bit more about that particular dessert as well--but also the pie chart of the individuals in her life--past, present, and future. These particular pie charts show just how much she has grown and changed over the course of the book. I appreciated how Violet is all about blaming her mother for her parents' disagreements at the beginning of the book, even calculating the ratio of nagging to compliments, and how she slowly realized the truth of the matter by the book's final pages. There aren't always happy endings in relationships, whether they be married adults or middle grade friends.

[Lydia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a full review, visit my blog at The Librarian's Lunchbox.

Violet loves two things in life: math and pie. She also loves her family, but lately her mom and dad have been fighting. A lot. Mom won’t stop nagging; she’s upset when Dad leaves his shoes in the hallway, when he forgets to stop at the store, and when he brings home fast food for dinner instead of creating a healthy, home cooked meal. Dad is fun but a little unreliable. When Violet missed the bus, Dad made her walk, in the rain, to school because he didn’t want to get out of bed.

Now Dad has moved out and won’t even return Violet’s calls or emails. Violet gets a big part in the school play, and her best friend McKenzie starts to drift away. Can math solve Violet’s problems and bring her family back together? Or are some problems to complicated for even math to solve?

If you read this book be prepared to be really, really annoyed with Violet’s dad. And then prepare to be annoyed with Violet herself. Violet tends to blame everything on Mom. Mom is a nag. Mom drove Dad away. If it weren’t for Mom, Dad would still be present.

NOPE. He’s literally the worst. What kind of man just walks away from his family and doesn’t answer his kid’s phone calls?! Ugh, infuriating. Of course, Violet goes through a bunch of personal growth because Dad is such a miserable human being, but it took way too long to get there!

Gosh, I just felt so bad for poor, hard working, overtaxed Mom. I wanted to draw her a bubble bath and pour her a glass of wine literally the entire book.

Four stars for this middle grade fiction about a girl who finds out math can’t solve every problem.

[Ena Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book for so many reasons. Violet has a rocky journey through her parent's divorce, and as she begins to see her parents for who they really are, she also finally sees her friends and their lives for what they are, realizing that families can be fractured in a multitude of ways. Ultimately Violet understands that it's her own life she needs to focus on—her own pie, and how that's divided (and served :)).

Speaking of her friends, and the kids at school, they are all so different, and there are personality issues that come through with just the right tone. Middle school can be tough to navigate, and it's captured really well in this story. In the midst of it all there's the school play, Violet's love of pie, and her gift with math, which comes across not only because of the storyline with her math teacher, but also because it's shown in how Violet thinks/processes information. She doesn't just think of math in terms of problems, she thinks of it in terms of highs and lows and how they relate to each other ... she processes life with math. This is shown throughout the book using a multitude of different graphs, and flow and pie charts, as Violet assesses her thoughts and feelings and what's going on and decides what to do about the problem at hand. Readers grade 3-7 will see themselves, their friends, and their families, within the pages of this book, and through Violet they might see a different way to process what's happening in their own lives. Hopeful, truthful, and fun, I highly recommend this book!

[Stephanie Tournas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twelve year old Violet loves math. But the logic of math cannot explain her father leaving the family, nor her best friend McKenzie’s opposition to Violet’s friendship with Ally, a popular girl who gets the lead in the school play. Other stressors are her her mother’s nagging (Is that why her father left?) and wondering why Dad doesn’t call her. Violet finds a satisfying distraction in her role as the cowardly lion in the school’s production of The Wizard of Oz, but then a fatherless home awaits her.

This is a gently humorous take on a family breakup, with a flawed, but lovable, self-deprecating narrator, a lover of math and pie. Her voice is real and relatable, and readers will identify with her worries and doubts about family, friendship and even romance, nicely illustrated by the pie charts, graphs and diagrams that give her solace. Notes, texts and emails also add the story.

[Deena Lipomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Math-loving Violet gets along her parents even though they always fight and is shocked when her dad moves out and doesn't contact her. Her best friend has also been acting weird since Violet scored a bigger part in the school play and Violet's been spending more time with other kids in the cast. While trying to use charts and graphs to solve her problems, Violet begins to learn that relationships are more complicated than math problems, and that there is more to any of us than shows on the surface. This book is mostly fun and funny, a bit sad, but realistic and subtle with some of its "lessons." The end offers friendship hopes and the potential for more honesty and communication. A lovely MG.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok, I really wanted to read this book. It's right up my alley with friendship and family problems, a crush, and a school play. However, i had a lot of problems with this book. I feel like the author wrote a caricature of a middle schooler. There seemed to be a lot of focus on different shades of white skin and on body types that didn't propel the plot at all and seemed superficial at best and insulting at worst. There was also the mention of mean nicknames for teachers and the principal that weren't explained and seemed unnecessary. I felt like the main character Violet was self-centered, not observant, and superficial. I think the writing was good but the problems I names above were scattered throughout the book, making it hard to enjoy.

[LS Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because of the description, I was expecting a totally different type of story and I think that’s why this book was disappointing. It really didn’t involve math, except that Violet was apparently good at it. But we only know that because it was mentioned a couple of times. And it didn’t really involve pie or pi, except that they went to a snack shop and ate pie a couple of times. I think the book was about the changes that happen in middle school and within a family. And those themes were worked through using theater. So I’m going to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in reading books about theater kids, or those making adjustments in middle school.

[Carlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would recommend this book. Especially for kiddos that struggle with enjoying reading. I think they would like it very much.

The story follows a Junior High girl named Violet. Her parents have just separated and her friendships are a little rocky, and unexpectedly she lands a lead role in the school musical. Oh, to be in Junior High again. smh.

Debra Green does an excellent job in creating a funny, relatable character that kids will come to love.

I highly recommend it.

[Christina]

So wish I had liked this one, but was horrified too much by the way the dad acted and how the mom mishandled it. I realize this is probably realistic and would be good for kids to read who need to know they're not the only ones; plus it was well-written because I couldn't put it down, but I can't imagine recommending it to anyone

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Digital ARC courtesy of Edelweiss and Holiday House.

[Jan Raspen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect middle school novel! I loved everything about it, from the friendship issues to the imperfect families all around.

[Alyssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great story that portrays life as a middle school girl dealing with friends, pressures and parents separating.

[Deanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Darling book. I am ordering for the library right now!

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Anna Runk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an amazing story about a girl and how she adapts to her father not being at home. She goes through many ups and downs in the course of the story. She participates in a play, makes new friends, and discovers that everyone is going through their own struggles.

[Melissa Marwedel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started slow but got better.

[Ernesto Cisneros · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A FUN AND ENGAGING READ ABOUT LIFE NOT ALWAYS ADDING UP!
HUMOR + HEART 2 + PI = A GRATIFYING MUST-READ!"