COOKIE QUEEN

King, who in 2000 founded Tate’s Bake Shop, offers halcyon reminiscences about her earliest entrepreneurial days.

Kathleen may only be 11, but she’s responsible for much of the family’s cooking and baking. She strikes up a deal with her dad, Tate: In exchange for baking and selling cookies at the family’s farm stand this summer, she can use the money on new clothes. So Kathleen sets out to create the best chocolate chip cookies, using trial and error not only to tweak her recipes, but also to find a way to outsell the competition. A note at the end explains how early experience led to her company (named after her dad); also included is a recipe, not for chocolate chip cookies but molasses ones. This story doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a guide to finding gaps in the market and innovating or a memoir of self-discovery? Stilted dialogue feels straight out of a business book for kids. “How are Kathleen’s cookies today?” “Great….But how do I make them so they’re the only cookies people want to buy?” Confusion extends to the illustrations, where 11-year-old Kathleen is depicted as particularly young and where perspective is at times askew. Kathleen and Tate both present White in the artwork. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Had this tale been subjected to as much testing as the titular cookies, how much tastier it could have been.