In his buonissimo picture book Pizza!: A Slice of History, Greg Pizzoli (The Quest for Z; The 12 Days of Christmas) asks the big questions: "All over the world, people love pizza./ But where did it start? When did it happen? Who made the first pizza?" Readers can follow the pizza rat (a bespectacled vermin with a pizza-slice car) on an elucidating journey that traces the origins of everyone's favorite triangle-shaped meal.
It will come as no surprise that pizza originated in Italy and is outrageously popular ("In the United States of America,/ we eat 350 slices of pizza every second"). However, Pizza! has its share of bombshells--e.g., who knew that the tomato didn't come from Italy? Some of the book's revelations make sense, such as the fact that Italian immigration to the U.S. in the late-19th and early-20th centuries played a role in what's become pizza's stateside ubiquity. Less intuitive for some readers will be various cultural spins on pizza (Brazilians like to top theirs with green peas, Costa Ricans with coconut). Here readers would do well to take a page from the pizza rat's playbook: "I'll try any pizza once!" And those who want to have a go at being a pizzaiolo can turn to the back-of-book mini-pizzas recipe.
Pizza! is illustrated with Pizzoli's congenially cartoonish cut-paper-like assemblies. Regarding his chosen palette, this reviewer can't beat the descriptors on the book's CIP page: "sweet-tomato red, fresh-basil green, greasy-cheese yellow, and charred-crust black." --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author