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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not-so-delicious, July 13, 2009
This review is from: The Chocolate Lovers' Club (Paperback)
I love chocolate and I love good chick-lit, especially of the British variety, so I was ready and excited to dive in to this potentially delicious read. Unfortunately, good chocolate just isn't enough to carry a story when the characters are vapid, shallow and seem completely implausible as actual human beings.
The book definitely has some redeeming and hilarious moments - a fabulous break-up revenge scene and a plot-turned-caper to retrieve Chantal's stolen jewels - but it was so hard for me not to shake my head in disbelief at the way the characters acted and spoke that the good moments just didn't outweigh the bad. I was especially turned off by Lucy, the narrator and convener of the Chocolate Lovers' Club. No self-respecting woman would actually stick with a cheating boyfriend for so long and actually be proud of herself for it, nor would true friends let such stupidity go on indefinitely. And when her Crush shows interest in her she's about as awkward and moronic as a girl could be - and not just once, but over and over again. I appreciate characters drawn from reality, people whose lives aren't perfect and whose problems are real if sometimes mundane, but Lucy was over-the-top. Chantal was the most appealing character for me, and her problems seemed the most legitimate, but even she possessed a fair amount of bizarre and unrealistic quirks that didn't fit together.
If you want to learn a million different types of chocolate, or drool over your book a bit, then this book is a worthwhile read. As far as chick-lit goes, however, I was really disappointed. I want to find women in books that strike me as people I might know, friends I might have - not women who make me cringe and give the worst name to the fairer sex.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Laughed my butt off!!, February 21, 2008
This book is fantastic. At first I thought, "Oh, no, not another cheesy tale about the lives of four friends who just happen to love chocolate." I've read "Shoe Addicts Anonymous" and that was just too generic for me so I thought this one would be similar. This one is different from most chick lit. There are lots of plot twists going on, creative ones, and Lucy is hilarious with her jobs and attitude. She reminds me of myself. And the "operation jewelry" endeavor was so funny. The only thing I didn't like was the gay guys owning the chocolate shop. Why do most chick lit book have to have the token gay guy? It gets tiring and old!! But great job on a very entertaining read!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Chocolate Lovers' Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, December 29, 2008
I found this book pretty ho-hum and definitely not worth staying up for (I usually can't put down a good book and often read well into the wee hours). It was hard to feel any kind of bond with the characters, so I wound up skimming through the last third of the book.
I love chocolate as much as the next person, but I found the constant mention of it to be quite tedious and off-putting. Like another reviewer, I just wondered why the characters in the novel were not completely obese. Not only that, but each chocolate "moment" was a self-conscious and awkward reference to a different brand and different type of chocolate, as if the author had a mandate to check-off a list of as many different kinds of chocolate as possible. It was as if the plot and the events in the book were just excuses to refer to chocolate. Case in point: "From her handbag, Chantal produced a bar of Clive's single Madagascar that she'd bought earlier in preparation for this moment" --- the moment, in this instance, was right after a funeral, and Chantal gives the chocolate to the bereaved spouse, as if to suggest that now chocolate (and this particular brand of chocolate, to boot) has been consumed, everything in the friend's life will be better!!
I also found it hard to "get" the characters' motivations -- I couldn't understand why Lucy, loving Crush as she said she did, would decide to get engaged to Marcus in the first place, and then persist in wanting to go through with the wedding despite a last-minute declaration of love. And then hours after the wedding is called off, she was having hot sex with someone who wasn't the fiance. She seemed so completely indecisive and wishy-washy, it was hard to feel any sympathy for her.
The whole business with the drug drop-off hours before the wedding was also completely unbelievable, and seemed to be stuck into the book just so the author could invent an adventurous romp for the characters.
I'm glad I didn't buy this book, and only borrowed it from the library. I like my chick lit to be intelligent, funny and engrossing, with at least one character whom I can feel I like and relate to. This book didn't have much of those characteristics, and there's a whole lot of better chick lit (including Brit chick lit) out there.
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