If September doesn’t conjure up images of text books, essays, and classrooms in your fresh-from-summer mind, chances are you at least imagine something in common with those school days: the printed word. Autumn finds you curling up on a lawn chair on your porch, on your sofa with a kitty on your lap, or under the glow of a booklight on your bed and losing yourself in a good book. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’ve got some chocolate within reach, too, to make those few hours you spend with a book the perfect precious moments of escape.
How could reading with some chocolate by your side possibly get any more appetizing? With chocolate-themed books! Not cookbooks—although those certainly are practical when the chocolate craving calls—but with compelling novels that will entertain as well as make you drool.
Some of the chocolate-themed movies we covered last month (Read the story here) are based on books. If you feel like regressing a bit to your childhood days, give Ronald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Puffin, 1964) an hour or two one afternoon. If chocolate is the food of passion to you, both Laura Esquivel’s Like Water For Chocolate (Anchor, 1989—it includes chocolate recipes, too!) and Joanne Harris’ Chocolat (Black Swan, 1999) should hit the spot. Here are a few more to add to your list!
Death by Chocolate
G.A. McKevett Publisher: Kensington Year First Published: 2005
(www.sonjamassie.com)
The eighth novel in Just Desserts, the Savannah Reid Mystery Series, Death by Chocolate is taken a little bit too literally in this page-turner by G.A. McKevett (a.k.a. Sonja Massie). Savannah Reid, a former Georgia Peach who’s now a San Carmelita, California-based detective and owner of the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency, is called on to protect the Gourmet Network’s Lady Eleanor, the self-proclaimed "Queen of Chocolate," after the cocoa sovereign receives numerous threatening letters. However, Savannah seems more cut out for the detective-business than the bodyguard job, as Lady Eleanor dies under her watch after eating some chocolate while taping an episode of her TV show. Now it’s up to Savannah and her partner Dick Coulter to find out who’d have a reason to kill the confectionary queen, but it’s not so easy when it turns out that off-camera, Lady Eleanor’s hush-hush lack of talent in recipe design was overshadowed only by her foul temper.
A casual reader of mysteries will be compelled by the chocolate theme but perhaps a little bored with or confused by the extensive character development of Savannah, who’s had seven books before this one in the series to get the reader intrigued. Those who thrive on the whodunit should love Death by Chocolate but might want to start with Just Desserts, the first book in this currently twelve-book series.
Julia’s Chocolates
Author: Cathy Lamb Publisher: Kensington Year First Published: 2007
(Cathy Lamb)
Julia Bennett’s a runaway bride but with good reason. She was about to marry a wealthy man (complete with a snobbish name: Robert Stanfield III), but this was no fairy tale; the "ideal" fiancé was no more than abusive swine. She flees Boston and heads across country—leaving her wedding dress on a tree in North Dakota on the way—and heads for the home of her feminist misandrist Aunt Lydia in the small town of Golden, Oregon. The residents of Golden are interesting to say the least. Julia gets to know a few of them by providing hand-made chocolates for her aunt’s weekly women-only "psychic nights." The women’s interest in her chocolates is only eclipsed by Julia’s interest in them. As she digs deeper, she finds the other women similarly scarred like her in their lives and relationships.
At the heart of the book is Julia’s relationship with the other women in the town and her journey to coming to terms with her own identity, although encouragement from charming lawyer Dean and one of Lydia’s only male friends, Stash, certainly help Lydia to blossom into her own independent woman. Cathy Lamb’s debut novel is part romance, part women-power "chick lit," and just what the chocoholic needs to lift her spirits!
The Chocolate War
Author: Robert Cormier Publisher: Knopf Year First Published: 1974
(Random House)
Widely considered one of the greatest young adult books of all time, Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War won’t disappoint adult readers, either. In fact, due to adult language, its depiction of a Catholic school as a front for a secret brutal society, and some imagined but explicit sexual encounters, this book is hardly for the immature. High schooler Jerry Renault’s attitude towards life changes after his mother’s death and he recognizes his father as the unenthused lethargic person he is. At Trinity, Jerry’s prep school, he begins to recognize hints of a secret society called "the Vigils" that invents bizarre "assignments" to keep Trinity’s students in line and to further their own interests. Jerry’s secret "assignment" is to refuse to sell chocolate during the first ten days of the school’s annual chocolate sale and to sell all of his boxes during the last ten days. When Jerry refuses to sell the chocolates even after the first ten days are over, he seems to be standing up for his honor. But could this refusal to cooperate lead him to fight for his life?
Although chocolate probably isn’t as appetizing as the key to a teen’s rebellion against his oppressors, this book contains a gripping story that will get you thinking. If you like the book, check out the 1988 film of the same name starring Ilan Mitchell-Smith and John Glover.
These are just the start of your chocolate-themed booklist this fall! Look for JoAnna Carl’s Chocoholic Mysteries Series (Signet, first book 2002), Zelda Benjamin’s romance Chocolate Secrets (Avalon, 2008), and the short story romance collection Seduction by Chocolate by Nina Bangs, Lisa Cach, Thea Devine, and Penelope Neri (Leisure Books, 2007), to name a few! There’s enough chocolate reading out there for even the most ardent chocoholic bookworm!
