“That’s the thing about fairy-tale endings. They don’t exist. But the ones you have to share, with everyone you love around you and good food spread over the counters and the city you love spread out before the open window with all it’s glimmering magic and promise?
Those I could live with.” – 2/5 stars!

Attention! This book contains: gang rivalry, comfort food, diversity, love advice, grandmothers, ghosts, butter, cooking competitions, pastries and superheroes.

A stunning collection of short stories about the intersection of family, culture, and food in the lives in teens, from bestselling and critically acclaimed authors, including Sandhya Menon, Anna-Marie McLemore, and Rin Chupeco.

A shy teenager attempts to express how she really feels through the pastries she makes at her family’s pasteleria. A tourist from Montenegro desperately seeks a magic soup dumpling that can cure his fear of death. An aspiring chef realizes that butter and soul are the key ingredients to win a cooking competition that could win him the money to save his mother’s life.

Welcome to Hungry Hearts Row, where the answers to most of life’s hard questions are kneaded, rolled, baked. Where a typical greeting is, “Have you had anything to eat?” Where magic and food and love are sometimes one in the same.

Told in interconnected short stories, Hungry Hearts explores the many meanings food can take on beyond mere nourishment. It can symbolize love and despair, family and culture, belonging and home.

I’m finally done with this book – I thought about DNFing it at least six times, but I kept going because I thought it would get better and I would eventually find a great story. That didn’t happen.

Don’t be fooled by the cover. If you’re like me, you probably looked at the cover and thought this book would be about cute and heartwarming food themed stories.The food aspect is there like expected, but the execution was not great.

I think the main problem I had with this book is that there are so many different genres in it –  romance, paranormal, action, gang, you name it, it’s there – that it gets too confusing and random. I get that this is an anthology, but other than the city and a few characters that appear in several stories, there’s nothing connecting these stories. For example, at some point you will be reading a violent gang story, and right after that, a cutesy romance story begins. The stories as a set are too different from each other, so they don’t fit together in this book.

On a positive note, the food descriptions made me very hungry. All the authors did an amazing job writing all about comfort food. I can tell every writer was a foodie!

I also liked how diverse the book was. There are so many nationalities represented here, and it was nice to learn about foreign cuisines and traditions. These were probably the things I liked the most about this book.

Overall I wouldn’t recommend this anthology. I strongly believe you’ll get better use of your time with another book, because this wasn’t entertaining nor memorable.

xoxo,