*Review* The Great Peach Experiment: Frozen Peaches by Erin Soderberg Downing

Genre: Children's 8-12

Published: April 4, 2023

Pages: 288

A frozen family “business trip” to Sweden’s Ice Hotel sets the Peaches on a new grand adventure. 

The third book in The Great Peach Experiment, great for fans of The Penderwicks and The Vanderbeekers.

Cashing in on his family’s recent good-luck streak, ten-year-old Freddy Peach has been entering his family in a bunch of sweepstakes, but he doesn’t really expect to win. And then he does—a free family trip to the Ice Hotel in Sweden!

Since the Peaches are now the proud owners of their own bed-and-breakfast, they decide they can’t pass up on the opportunity. It’s research. They'll learn more about what it takes to operate a successful hotel from one of the most famous tourist destinations in the world.

But what the Peaches don’t know is that five families from five frozen locations have been brought together to compete for the honor of frozen best. They’ll face-off in a series of challenges from dog sled racing to ice carving to an ice-cold cook out. But when the going gets tough, the Peaches have always come together in the past? Why should this time be any different?

The third book in the Great Peach Experiment series, Frozen Peaches is a sweet treat, mixing humor, adventure, warmth (despite the cold) and a lot of heart to make another great book readers will be delighted to devour.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

I received a copy of this book through Netgalley. This is my honest review. 

This book was selected as part of a Top Ten Tuesday roulette game where I had my kids pick books that they would want to read for me to try and get approved for. So this isn't a book I would typically have selected for myself. The story is told from the perspective of the three Peach children, so the language is very juvenile and fairly simple, with explanations of words that maybe stretch the vocabularies of the expected readers. We rotate through their perspectives, with each kid getting a chapter before moving on to the next Peach. 

Each kid had different interests and strengths that ultimately helped them in the Frozen Olympic event the Frozen Hotel put on for the contest winners. This doesn't mean they always won the competitions, but they certainly gave it their all. I wasn't particularly invested in the story until right near the end, and even then it was really just a passing interest, but I'm also not the target audience. 

This would be a good book for a younger reader, or for reading a chapter before bed as the chapters are on the short side, and each chapter changes perspective so every night you'd have a different character's perspective to read through. But ultimately this book was mostly a bust for me personally, so I give it 3.17 out of 5 stars. - Katie 

Amazon

ERIN SODERBERG DOWNING has written more than seventy-five books, including Controlled Burn and Just Keep Walking (coming February 2024). The first three books in her latest middle-grade series - THE GREAT PEACH EXPERIMENT: When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Peach Pie (a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection), The Peach Pit, and Frozen Peaches - are in stores now, and the fourth Peach adventure (Duck, Duck, Peach) will be out in April 2024. Some of her other popular series are Puppy Pirates, The Quirks, and Disney's Daring Dreamers Club. Before becoming an author, Erin was a children’s book editor, a cookie inventor, and also worked for Nickelodeon. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, three hilarious kids, a cuddly goldendoodle named Wally (the star of Puppy Pirates!), and Nutmeg the mischievous mini Aussiedoodle puppy.

More info can be found at: www.erinsoderberg.com