Gut Reaction
Written by Kirby Larson and Quinn Wyatt
Scholastic Press
Ages 8-12
Available March 5th, 2024

Tess Medina’s new beginning is anything but refreshing. She just moved to a new town, she’s started a new middle school, and ever since her dad died three years ago, she can’t shake these new sharp pains in her stomach after every meal. Luckily, Tess is an excellent baker thanks to her dad—but she can’t eat anything she makes, and she has to develop a mental map of all public bathrooms in case “the Knife” visits her stomach (p 137). Despite these difficulties, Tess meets some warm, unwavering friends (with the help of her salted butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookies), who help give her courage to enter the Junior Baker Competition. As she prepares, Tess’ pain becomes so unbearable that she eventually receives another new thing: a diagnosis. Culminating in an exciting, fast-paced baking competition that pushes Tess to her mental and physical limits, she learns how to fit her love of baking into her new normal.

Award-winning author Kirby Larson partners with her daughter, Quinn Wyatt, for a mother-daughter debut that balances grief, loneliness, and chronic illness with joy, passion, and friendship. Wyatt’s personal experience with Crohn’s disease genuinely immerses readers in Tess’ emotional and physical distress. At the same time, mouth-watering recipes, strong friendships, and witty middle-school humor add depth and hope to the more distressing plotlines. As Tess works through pain and grief, Larson and Wyatt slyly offer readers coping skills, such as Tess’ breathing mantra: “inhale to four, exhale to eight” (p 9). Ending the book with Tess thinking, “I have a disease; I’m not a disease,” Larson and Wyatt instill a lasting powerful message of self-acceptance that can help give readers strength during any number of middle-grade maladies (p 253).