Cold Hard Facts • Donut Days

Donut Days by Lara Zielin
Publisher: Putnam Juvenile
Publication Date: August 6, 2009
Source/Format: Borrowed from the library || Hardcover

Emma has a lot going on. Her best friend's not speaking to her, a boy she's known all her life is suddenly smokin' hot and in love with her, and oh yes, her evangelical minister parents may lose their church, especially if her mother keeps giving sermons saying Adam was a hermaphrodite.

But this weekend Emma's only focused on Crispy Dream, a hot new donut franchise opening in town, where Harley bikers and Frodo wannabes camp out waiting to be the first ones served. Writing the best feature story on the camp for the local paper might just win Emma a scholarship to attend a non- Christian college. But soon enough Emma finds the donut camp isn't quite the perfect escape from all her troubles at Living Word Redeemer.

Donut Days focuses on Emma's attempts to try to understand the concepts of God and religion. I could definitely relate to Emma as she struggled to try to figure out her own particular stance when it came to what she believed. Zielin does a great job of highlighting different factors that made Emma's struggle so difficult: her parents' rules, her own aspirations and beliefs, what was happening to her friends, what was happening in church and what was not happening to her, to name most of them. The reality of Emma's situation hit a nerve with me and made the entire story very relatable.

The Donut Camp (which is basically when fans of donut stores camp out for a new branch's opening) was a hilarious concept to me, but I loved it. (And if I had the opportunity and the right company, I'd probably do it.) It gave an interesting twist to the story and plus, we were able to meet the Angelfire Witnesses (a group of born again bikers), who were my favorite characters apart from Emma.

There's a lot of things going on in Donut Days, but the events are, to me, part and parcel of the whole ordeal that Emma goes through. It warms my heart to see how it ends - and I thought it was a pretty realistic conclusion.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5168510-donut-days?ac=1 was a delightful little book, and I'm glad to finally have been able to read it.