Midsummer's Mayhem by Rajani LaRocca

Eleven-year-old Mimi Mackson dreams of winning a local baking contest to finally prove she’s not the least talented member of her large Inidan-American family. Plus, it’ll start her on the path to becoming a celebrity chef like her culinary idol, Puffy Fay. But when Mimi’s dad returns from a business trip, he’s mysteriously lost his highly honed sense of taste. Without his help, Mimi will never be able to bake something impressive enough to propel her to gastronomic fame.

Drawn into the woods behind her house by a strangely familiar song, Mimi meets Vik, a boy who brings her to parts of the forest she’s never seen. Who knew there were banyan trees and wild boars in Massachusetts? Together they discover exotic ingredients and bake them into delectable and enchanting treats.

But as her dad acts stranger every day, and her siblings’ romantic entanglements cause trouble in their town, Mimi begins to wonder whether the ingredients she and Vik found are somehow the cause of it all. She needs to use her skills, deductive and epicurean, to uncover what’s happened. In the process, she learns that in life, as in baking, not everything is sweet…

Squabbling sisters, rhyming waitresses, and culinary saboteurs mix up a recipe for mayhem in this Indian-American mashup of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and competitive baking.

Book description from https://www.rajanilarocca.com/novels/midsummers-mayhem/

Snacks

• Chocolate-chunk thyme cookies (Page 135: "'Dear lovely Mimi, what have you brought us today?' she asked with a smile. 'Chocolate-thyme cookies with fresh citrus zest,' I said.") Recipe from the Baking Event Kit on Rajani LaRocca's website.

• Peach ginger ale (Page 239: "We each took a cup as we passed and drank the sweet chilled beverage--it was refreshing and tasted like ginger ale with a swirl of summer peaches.") 

Activities

• We played bingo on a board I made using pictures of characters and foods in the book. We used pictures of edible flowers as the bingo markers. (I gave each girl a copy of the "Guide to Edible Flowers" chart from ProFlowers. I just adjusted it on Canva so it fit on one normal piece of paper to print.)

• The girls drew a picture of a pitta bird. We did an art lesson using the "How to Draw a Bluebird" lesson from Art for Kids Hub. Instead of coloring it the way they did in the lesson, we stopped and looked at pictures of a pitta bird to match the correct colors. I showed the picture of the pitta bird on the cover of the book as well as a picture of an actual Indian pitta bird I found online. I also shared the description in the book that said, “It has a yellow chest, red belly, green wings, and a black mask.”

• I made a crossword puzzle about magical plants and also included three riddles written by the author that I got from the Baking Event Kit mentioned earlier. (These riddles are similar to the ones in the book that introduced the special ingredient for each baking challenge.) We didn't do this during book club, but I encouraged the girls to try it out on their own time.