I am so confused. Rose is a teenager who loves to bake and works as a waitress at a local restaurant in her small town. She’s impulsive, childish, and tends to act before she thinks. Her best friend, Fred, is the opposite. His mom owns the restaurant, which has fallen on hard times, and he’s more down to Earth and realistic than Rose. After Rose accidentally impresses a food critic who stops at the restaurant, she is invited to participate in a reality tv baking competition. She needs a partner and recruits Fred to go with her, hoping they will win enough money to put them through culinary school and save the family restaurant. This has to be one of the weirdest graphic novels I’ve ever read regarding pacing and overall concepts. Batter Royale has everything needed to be a fun little story, but it feels like the author tried to chuck in as many ‘teenage’ things as possible that all ended up disjointed. Rose needs money for school because her parents are separating, but her feelings on this aren’t pressed upon enough as a kid who finds this out JUST as she’s headed to a competition away from her family for the first time. It’s all surface-level disappointment, but it didn’t feel convincing to me. Not only that, the competition itself is BONKERS. Honestly, what the hell is happening on this show? OSHA would have shut this down five minutes into production. I know it’s important to suspend your disbelief for stories like this, but these are 17 yr olds being bound and gagged and falling into traps on the floor for a baking competition? There’s also a stereotypical mean girl who has a famous chef for a father, and aside from a throwaway scene in which she admits to being in his shadow, she never gets her comeuppance for being actively awful through the whole show portion. She sabotages everyone on the show and receives no punishment for it, and we don’t learn anything about any of the other kids on the show, yet we are supposed to feel sorry for them as they get screwed over for Rose and Fred to make it to the final? I don’t know what to even say about this one. I didn’t hate it; I didn’t even dislike it all that much! The art is cute in a Middle Grade, cartoony way, and I loved the diversity in the characters. Still, everything else felt so thrown together that it was hard to get into the book and feel any emotion toward characters outside of disbelief. Title: Batter Royale Author: Leisl Adams Format: Paperback Pages: 9781419750762 ISBN: 240 Three Descriptors: Badly paced, Cartoony, Up and Down Read Alikes: Love a la Mode by Stephanie Kate Strohm I’ll Be the One by Lyla Lee Beauty and the Besharam by Lillie Vale Where There’s a Whisk by Sarah J. Schmitt My Mechanical Romance by Alexene Farol Follmuth