REVIEW for Donut Days

A big, big thank you goes out to author Lara Zielin who was so kind in sending me her great, great book!!!

TITLE: Donut Days

AUTHOR: Lara Zielin

GENRE: YA

RATING: 4 Stars

I loved, loved this book. I have to say that I admire author Lara Zielin - I thought this book was going to be a nice, sweet story involving teens and donuts (yum! donuts!). It turns out that Donut Days was wayyyy more than that.

Author Zielin chose a somewhat difficult and controversial subject - religion as the main theme of her book. We meet the main character, Emma - she is the daughter of two pastors and she is not your usual "children of the church". Although she knows that god exists, she is just not capable of spending all of her time and energy on church related themes and issues. This, of course, proves itself to be a problem with her parents.

What I loved about this story is that while the parents and the daughter do not see eye to eye, we don't get a lot of nasty interactions between them. I did not feel that the parents, for the first part of the book, were absolutely not in touch with their daughter's feelings at all - indeed they felt like non present parents actually (which will get cleared up towards the back end of the storyline) and I found myself highly frustrated that they just did not seem capable of treating their daughter like a member of the family - lots of secrets were being kept.

At the same time, Emma is trying to figure out her role in life and in the her family, seeing a disconnect between herself, her parents and the church. She decides that she needs to write an article about the new donut shop that is going to be opening (which attracts groupies at each opening) and she spends some interesting time meeting some of the groupies and discovering that life is happening right in front of her.

This book is full of messages and somehow the author manages to write a story involving religion that never gets preachy. The author also manages to write a story about friendship, betrayal and survival of the spririt which is uplifting and she also manages to write about the difference between claiming your are christian and acting as a christian.

I liked that Emma had alot of the same religious issues that I have felt in the past - including the contradiction of people attending church and claiming they are christian, yet at the same time hurting their fellow man.

Although all of this may sound a little heavy, I can assure you that this book is a joy to read and i breezed through it in just a few days.

I loved, loved this book and I hope that Zielin writes a sequel.