Slider by Pete Hautman

From Goodreads,

"Competitive eating vies with family expectations in a funny, heartfelt novel for middle-grade readers by National Book Award winner Pete Hautman.

David can eat an entire sixteen-inch pepperoni pizza in four minutes and thirty-six seconds. Not bad. But he knows he can do better. In fact, he'll have to do better: he's going to compete in the Super Pigorino Bowl, the world's greatest pizza-eating contest, and he has to win it, because he borrowed his mom's credit card and accidentally spent $2,000 on it. So he really needs that prize money. Like, yesterday. As if training to be a competitive eater weren't enough, he's also got to keep an eye on his little brother, Mal (who, if the family believed in labels, would be labeled autistic, but they don't, so they just label him Mal). And don't even get started on the new weirdness going on between his two best friends, Cyn and HeyMan. Master talent Pete Hautman has cooked up a rich narrative shot through with equal parts humor and tenderness, and the result is a middle-grade novel too delicious to put down."

Goodreads - Slider

I feel like food always brings people together.  I have countless memories with one of my college suitemates of us making late night Taco Bell runs.  We would sit in our common room huddled around a tiny end table laughing and telling stories.  I have memories of going to Chili's with my best friend and always ordering the same thing, until we finally grew up one day and started trying other food.  Food brings lots of warm and fuzzy feelings for me, which is why this book with sliders all over the cover caught my attention.

Slider is told by a teenager named David.  David is the middle child with a studious older sister and an autistic younger brother.  He sometimes feels sandwiched in the middle where he doesn't get much attention.  But David is fascinated with people eating food in record time, which he realizes he is pretty good at himself.  After accidentally spending $2000 on his mom's credit card, he decides to sign up for the local pizza eating contest.  David must learn to eat in record time, while also learning how he fits in with his family. 

I absolutely adored this book.  I am a huge fan of diversity in books and this book had just that.  David was the typical kid, but he ate a lot.  There was the seemingly perfect sibling.  There was the workaholic dad and the busy mom.  But I think my favorite character of all had the fewest words, and that was the little brother Mal.  He is autistic, although his family doesn't like to label him.  Throughout the book we learn about what some of his sensory issues are and how he reacts.  I think this is a perfect way for other people and students to learn about people who have autism and that a label doesn't define them.  This wasn't the entire focus of the book, but it was subtly worked in so that you were still learning about it.  This is the perfect way to make a book diverse because so many students are on the spectrum, and we don't even realize it!  I loved Mal and all his little quirks.  It was really enjoyable to see David learn about Mal and how his autism affects him. 

Something else that I really loved about this book was all the food!  Each chapter, with the exception of a few, were labeled with a food item.  For example, pizza, Cheerios, onion rings, etc. were all names chapters.  But those items were somehow included in the chapter.  It was fun to find the title of the chapter somewhere in the chapter itself.  The only problem was that the chapter titles and their contents made me very hungry while I was reading!

There wasn't really anything that I didn't like about this book.  I can recall one instance where there was a cuss word, but other than that it was wonderful.  I give this 5 stars and will absolutely be putting this in my classroom library.  I think fourth graders would really enjoy this book and all the food included in it!