I Have A History With Doughnuts So I Had To Read "Doughnut Fix"

I have a childhood memory of a jelly doughnut that I got somewhere in Middlebury, Vermont with an incredibly thin crust sprinkled with regular sugar, not powdered. No doughnut in my adult experience has matched it. When my children were young, they would get me jelly doughnuts and The Sunday New York Times for Mother's Day. Ah, yes, doughnuts could bring a tear to the eye in those days.

Then my sons went to work in a bakery and started bringing home dozens of unsold doughnuts at the end of the day. They aren't good the next day. I don't find that they freeze all that well. Yes, you can have too much of a good thing. Except for stops at a few Tim Horton's when I was in Canada, doughnuts lost their attraction for me. Having to give up gluten did not improve the situation. There's a gluten free bakery near here that makes something round with a hole in that is edible but is stretching the definition of "doughnut."

You can see what drew me to The Doughnut Fix by  Jessie Janowitz.

Now The Doughnut Fix deals with the classic/cliched kid situation of a child being forced to move away from home/friends. But it's well done. It's good.

• The move is brought about by a believable crisis. Maybe I'm reading something into this, because I'm an adult, but I thought the parents were, again believably, just barely holding on.
• While the friends-growing-away-from-each-other thing is another classic/cliched kid situation, Tristan was believable with it and didn't carry on with it forever. I also wanted to wring the friend's mother's neck. Metaphorically speaking, of course. 
• The siblings and their relationships were realistic and unique. 
• Let's-start-a-doughnut-business--Also unique. And...doughnuts. 
• Finally, at one point I was reading this book and thought "This is a good book about cooking."

This was an entertaining read with good narrative drive. It turns out there's a sequel that sounds just different enough to be interesting. 

Interesting point--The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken gets a few mentions in this book. I don't believe I've read the book and decided I should. It's not available at any of my library sources, which I found interesting, because I thought it was a child classic. It is still in print, though.