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By Pete Hautman

A pizza-eating contest could solve David's $2,000 mistake, but family and friendship challenges await.

4.0/5 Goodreads · 3,161 ratings

288 pages· 50,104 words· Est. 5.5 hour read

$8.99Save 5%

In stock. Also at Amazon or Bookshop.

Bookroo's summary

David faces a high-stakes pizza-eating contest to fix a $2,000 blunder with his mom's credit card. As he trains for the Super Pigorino Bowl, he juggles caring for his brother Mal and navigating tensions between friends Cyn and HeyMan. Can David balance family, friendship, and his competitive dreams, or will everything crumble like a pizza crust?

From the publisher

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.

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