Gut Reaction, by Kirby Larson & Quinn Wyatt

Tess loves to bake and her cookies and cakes help her make friends at her new school.  Baking also makes her feel close to her father, who died a few years ago.  He taught her the skills and encouraged her to compete to get better.  Now, her friends and fans want her to go to the Jubilee Flour Junior Baker West Coast competition, but she hesitates because it was at this same competition that her father died. Competing there will bring back all of those memories.

Overshadowing this drama is another issue:  Tess keeps experiencing episodes of extreme gastro-intestinal pain.  Certain foods seem to hit it off and she starts trying to alter her diet to prevent the "porcupine" inside her gut from attacking her.  That works for a while, but the episodes become more frequent and more intense so that she renames it a "knife" instead.  In the end, she lands in the hospital with a diagnosis of Crohn's disease.  And now the question is what sort of chance can she have to have a normal life (let alone continue in competitive baking) with such a debilitating disease?

Crohn's is a particularly embarrassing disease because it deals with a part of our bodies that we don't usually talk about.  And for a middle schooler like Tess it would be particularly awkward.  So, I think it was really important to create a book like this in which a young  reader facing this condition for the rest of their life could find some representation.  

And it's a nicely done book.  Tess has enough of a sense of humor to make the rather serious stuff she's dealing with not overwhelm the reader.  I'm less taken by all the other stuff in this story. The baking story  often distracts, but the book would have been too short without something else for Tess to do.  And having it be food related carries a nice irony.  The dead father seemed less useful as a storyline and never really got developed.  It's also terrible cliché.  Perhaps letting the Dad live would have been better.