Eli Over Easy: A Moving Middle Grade Novel About Loss, Love, and Healing Through Cooking for Children (Ages 8-12)

From the acclaimed author of Small Town Pride, Phil Stamper, comes a heartfelt coming-of-age middle grade novel about grief, love, loss, and finding your way forward in the vein of Kate Allen’s The Line Tender and Jules Machias’s Both Can Be True.

The last few months have been pretty tough for Eli. He moved to New York City and left his small town in Minnesota with his extended family and everyone he knows. He hasn’t made any new friends. And his mom died unexpectedly, shattering his whole world. He misses Mom more and more every day, but Dad refuses to talk about her, leaving Eli alone in his grief. 

Then Eli finds a stash of instructional cooking videos his mom made, revealing her dream of being a celebrity chef. With the help of the cute new neighbor boy, Mathias, Eli decides to follow his mother’s recipes using her videos. If he can re-create his mom's special dishes, then maybe a part of her can stay with him forever. But what happens when the videos run out?

• LGBTQ Middle Grade: A sweet, gentle story of friendship and a budding first romance between Eli and his new neighbor, Mathias.
• Grief and Healing: To feel close to the mom he lost, Eli uses her secret recipe videos to bring her cooking back to life, one challenging dish at a time.
• Found Family: As Eli navigates his new life in the city, he finds unexpected support from his gamer cousin Riley and his kind neighbor, Mrs. Martinez.
• New York City Setting: From a tiny Manhattan apartment to the top of the Empire State Building, Eli discovers that even in a city of millions, you can find your own place to call home.

Phil Stamper is the bestselling author of The Gravity of Us, As Far as You’ll Take Me, Golden Boys, Small Town Pride, and other queer books for kids and teens. He currently works in author development for a major book publisher in New York City, where he lives with his husband and their dog. Visit him at philstamper.com.