Hiding Out at the Pancake Palace by Nan Marino (review)

Eleven-year-old Elvis Ruby is a phenomenal talent: he can play just about any musical instrument, sing like an angel, ooze charisma, and oh, that hair! He’s a shoo-in to win TweenStar, the reality show/performance competition, or at least he was until he froze on stage and immediately had to go into hiding at a family friend’s pancake restaurant in a small New Jersey town. Cecelia Wreel, a resident of that small town, couldn’t be more different from Elvis: she’s an unpopular, unmusical small-town girl (though she thinks she might like music if she could hear the song that her mother and father insist was playing through the pines on the night she was born in a cedar swamp in New Jersey). When Elvis shows up at her local pancake place disguised as a nondescript boy named Aaron, she sees him as a potential friend, but when she overhears him whispering his real name to the pines one night, she imagines that he, if anyone, can help her find her song. The infusion of the folkloric tropes of singing pines and the Jersey Devil adds a not-meant-to-be-subtle metaphor for the problems that beset the two; both are on the cusp of adolescence and searching for their identities in mostly the wrong places by trying to live up to the ideals of those around them. Threaded through the book are wisps of other themes, such as the power of music, the importance of maintaining tradition weighed against staying current, and the difficulty of keeping secrets. While these individual melodies are sweetly played, the book never becomes a harmonic whole, with abrupt shifts between subplots that readers will need to synthesize without much authorial assistance. It’s really the premise that takes center stage anyway: Elvis himself is a stand-in for an actual young pop star with real talent and swoon-inducing hair, and the story of his going into hiding among regular folk will have wish-fulfillment appeal for many a young reader.