His grandparents run a cake shop and his dad was always making cakes before he died. Some kids love sports and some love reading and others love dance or games. The end result is a balancing act that will keep you absorbed and reading until the end.

There’s a whole lotta sad going on here, and a whole lotta humor as well. For the kid that avoids serious stories like the plague, Pie in the Sky is the perfect gateway drug. Gracefully switching between text and comics, comics and text, author Remy Lai feeds breadcrumbs (or, more accurately, cake crumbs) of humor and sequential art to kids, luring them towards a storyline with a deeper, darker meaning. Pin in the Sky is by all accounts a debut, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. Far more common, then, are the books that look funny and then, when you least expect it, hit you in the gut with – BAM! - Pathos!! It’s not a bad way to go about things, if the writing can pull off the switch. The publishing world of the early 21st century has little tolerance for meaningless whimsy. I have a grudging respect for these books, since I think it’s a lot harder to get them published in today’s market. It can be simply amusing for the sake of amusement, making no attempt at being meaningful in any way.

Now a hilarious novel for children can go one of two ways. I’m not avoiding the serious stuff, but through a series of unlikely events I found myself diving deep into funny book after funny book. Though I didn’t quite mean to, I ended up reading a whole slew of middle grade novels that were funny. This year, I stumbled into an unexpected pattern.

Pie in the sky lai