Pie by Sarah Weeks

Alice's aunt Polly, world-famous pie maker, dies and leaves her recipe to her grumpy cat Lardo, and her cat to Alice.  Alice's mother is jealous of her sister's success with pies and people, someone is out to steal the cat in order to get the pie recipe, and suddenly everyone is trying to make pies to fill the pie-gap.  Includes recipes.

SLJ: grades 4-6

Close to Famous, by Joan Bauer

13-year old Foster McFee and her mother leave Memphis in a hurry when her mom's Elvis-impersonator boyfriend gives mom a black eye.  Leaving with only the items they can fit in their car, which is pretty much everything they own, they end up randomly stopping in Culpepper, West Virginia.  With no other destination in mind, they decide to stay in Culpepper, at least for the rest of the summer, and meet and befriend some of the town's inhabitants.  Because it is a small town, of course many of the inhabitants are eccentric and quirky, but at least their quirks are a different than the usual fare:  Miss Charleena is a former movie star who is hiding out after losing her confidence when her husband left her for a younger woman, Angry Wayne, owner of Angry Wayne's Bar and Grill is...if not angry, at least crotchety and a bit cranky, and Macon is a budding documentarist, just a tweenage one without a camera.