True Confections: A Novel [Hardcover]

Katharine Weber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 29, 2009

Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsider’s perspective. This is the recipe for True Confections, the irresistible new novel by Katharine Weber, a writer whose work has won accolades from Iris Murdoch, Madeleine L’Engle, Wally Lamb, and Kate Atkinson, to name a few.
 
Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky’s marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip’s Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, where she has worked for most of her life. In True Confections, Alice has her reasons for telling the multigenerational saga of the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in crisis.
 
Nobody is more devoted than Alice to delving into the truth of Zip’s history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo, from which he taught himself English. Within Alice’s vivid and persuasive account (is her unreliability a tactic or a condition?) are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of Côte d’Ivoire and the Third Reich’s failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews.
 
Richly informed, deeply moving, and spiked with Weber’s trademark wit, True Confections is, at its heart, a timeless and universal story of love, betrayal, and chocolate.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this winning, offbeat tale, Weber unfurls Alice Tatnall's insecure Unitarian adolescence, which leads to her approval-seeking adulthood as the wife of candy heir Howard Howdy Ziplinsky. Alice has felt ostracized by family and peers after accidentally burning down a classmate's house as a teenager. As a result, her college acceptance is rescinded, and she ends up working at Zip's Candies, where she meets and falls in love with the owner's son, a Jewish man 10 years her senior. After marrying Howard, Alice takes to the candy business quickly and has two kids. Alice's story, framed as an affidavit, is a pleasure to read and full of small and not so small surprises, including the near-tragedy at the candy company that has much to do with why she's writing an affidavit in the first place. Alice is an immediately lovable narrator, and her narration eventually bears hints about its possible lack of credibility, giving readers even more of a reason to keep turning pages. This story of love, life and sweets is a genuine treat. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In her fifth novel, after Triangle (2006), Weber unleashes a wacky comic sensibility. Ostracized by her high-school clique and denied admission to college after accidentally setting fire to a classmate’s home, Alice Tatnall applies for a job at Zip’s Candies on a whim and finds her life’s calling. Immediately taken under the wing of candy magnate Sam Ziplinsky, Alice learns the ins and outs of the candy-making business, from mixing the proper proportions of the ingredients to repairing the ancient production line that churns out the company’s reliable moneymakers, Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos. She further cements her place within the company and the family by marrying Sam’s son and heir Howard “Howdy” Ziplinsky and bearing him two children. Billed as an affidavit, Alice’s slyly funny, frequently self-serving, and perhaps unreliable narration leads to some unexpected surprises when Alice’s old nickname, Arson Girl, comes back to haunt her in a big way. Filled with candy lore, impassioned critiques of chocolate, and Alice’s one-of-a-kind takes on marriage and family, this is sweet reading for fans of the offbeat. --Joanne Wilkinson

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Crown (December 29, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307395863
• ISBN-13: 978-0307395863
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #862,888 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Katharine Weber's five highly-praised and award-winning novels have made her a book club favorite. Her sixth book, a memoir called The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities, was published by Crown in July 2011 and has already won raves from the critics, from Ben Brantley in the New York Times ("Ms. Weber is able to arrange words musically, so that they capture the elusive, unfinished melodies that haunt our memoires of childhood") to the Dallas Morning News ("gracefully written, poignant and droll"), the NY Daily News ("Old Scandals, what fun...the core of her tale is that of elegant sin and betrayal"), and the Boston Globe (a masterful memoir of the private world of a very public family"), among others.

Her most recent novel, True Confections, the story of a chocolate candy factory in crisis, was published in January 2010 by Shaye Areheart Books and was published in December 2010 in paperback by Broadway Books. Critics raved: "A great American tale" (New York Times Book Review), "Marvelous, a vividly imagined story about love, obsession and betrayal" (Boston Globe), "Katharine Weber is one of the wittiest, most stimulating novelists at work today...wonderful fun and endlessly provocative" (Chicago Tribune),"Succulently inventive" (Washington Post),"Her most delectable novel yet" (L.A. Times).

Katharine's fiction debut in print, the short story "Friend of the Family," appeared in The New Yorker in January, 1993. Her first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (of which that story was a chapter), was published by Crown Publishers, Inc. in 1995 and was published in paperback by Picador in 1996. It will be published in a new paperback edition by Broadway Books in Summer, 2011.

She was named by Granta to the controversial list of 50 Best Young American Novelists in 1996.

Her second novel, The Music Lesson, was published by Crown Publishers, Inc. in 1999, and was published in paperback by Picador in 2000. The Music Lesson has been published in twelve foreign languages, and is being reissued in the U.S. by Broadway Books in January, 2011.

The Little Women was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2003 and by Picador in 2004. All three novels were named Notable Books by The New York Times Book Review.

Her fourth novel, Triangle, which takes up the notorious Triangle Waist company factory fire of 1911, was published in 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in 2007 by Picador.

Katharine's maternal grandmother was the songwriter Kay Swift. Since Swift's death in 1993, Katharine has been a Trustee and the Administrator of the Kay Swift Memorial Trust, which is dedicated to preserving and promoting the music of Kay Swift. This work includes the first Broadway musical with a score by a woman, "Fine and Dandy," and several popular show tunes of the era, among them "Fine and Dandy" and "Can't We Be Friends?" (www.kayswift.com)

Katharine is on the staff at Star, a foundation dedicated to offering personal growth retreats in the Arizona desert. (www.starfound.org)


Katharine has taught fiction writing at Connecticut College, Yale University (for eight years), and the Paris Writers Workshop. She was the Kratz Writer in Residence at Goucher College in Spring 2006. Katharine is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in the graduate writing program in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Katharine is married to the cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber (author most recently of The Bauhaus Group), and they have two daughters.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "My pleasurable slide into that warm chocolate vat.", January 5, 2010

By 

Michael Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: True Confections: A Novel (Hardcover)

Katharine Weber unfurls a unique blend of sweetness and pleasure, rich and exotic, from the moment that her heroine Alice Tatnall steps into the Zip's Candy factory back in 1975. Thought of as the local Arson Girl, after setting fire to her friend Debbie Livingston's house, Alice's rancid and bitter piece of the past, becomes inexorably blended into the present. Even when the fire was an unpremeditated and freakish accident, Alice is desperate to escape her Arson Girl fate. Soon enough she's captivated by every aspect of this stirring, sugary world of Zip's Candies and the lively, exotic Ziplinksy family. inhaling the sugary, life-giving air with gratitude every morning and letting it "sweeten and soothe every corner of her scorched, empty self." But Alice is not only seduced all of the delicious Little Sammys, Tigermelts, and licorice Mumbo Jumbos with the burnt sugar and chocolate aroma, "that marvelous, ineffable ,just right aura of Zip's Candies." But she's also powerfully attracted to the dark and handsome and wisecracking Howard, the son of the Sam Ziplinsky, the company's owner.

Originally hired by Sam, Alice finds herself bucking the attentions of his wife, the condescending and irritable Frieda Ziplinsky, across the whirring, clanking, chugging, sugar-caked Zip's Candies factory floor. A lonely exile from her own sad family, Alice's journey is broad and intimate, as she retraces the flaky and non-standard Jewish marriage to Howard along with many family revelations. Her recollection of events plunges us into world where the label "Dat's Tasty!" cannot help but infer a simple, naive, underhanded racism. Alice also cannot avoid confrontation with Frieda, Sam's officious wife who can't keep her unbeautiful son away from this interloper into the family. Later on Alice must also contend with Howard's sister, Irine, her entire otiose connection to the business really only ever about her own status and prosperity where she has used her money over the years to fund a wide variety of "half-baked do-good, feel-good enterprises of the moment."

Weber blends Zip's Candies history into Alice's very real world, retooling the Ziplinsky family lore and the founder Eli Czaplinksy, a Hungarian Jew, and an orphan who arrived at sixteen with his older brother Morris at Ellis Island in 1920. Eli worked perpetually to keep in his dream of his beautiful sweet candies and the success and prosperity those candies bring moving forward while he left the third and youngest brother Julius left behind with cousins in Budapest. Julius, full of Czaplinsky motivation and determination, arrives in Madagascar, a Jewish exile from the war, and figuring the best claim to stake, uses his diamonds to build his own empire.

Central to this novel however, are Alice's thoughtful observations of the worldwide candy trade, with all of the Little Sammies, and Tigermelts and Mumbo Jumbos whizzing along the lines on their journey from raw ingredients to finished candies to wrapped products tightly packed into boxes for shipping. While parts of the novel get bogged down a bit by the ins and outs of the multi-national candy corporations, and their contractual history, True Confections is mostly a unique tale about human nature and how we resist genuine patterns and meanings. As Alice increasingly battles Howard's unwillingness, or constitutional inability to play the part of a grown up, we constantly are witness to particular form of arrogance that can afflict those who have had all their good fortune handed to them. All the while, the candy lines remain perpetually in motion, forever after, mixing and blending and forming and extruding a new ending flow of candy, the innovative vision of Eli Ziplinsky finally made real. Mike Leonard January 10.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars HOW SWEET IT IS!, January 13, 2010

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: True Confections: A Novel (Hardcover)

"How sweet it is!" TRUE CONFECTIONS is as irresistible as a box of chocolates - the story is filled with greed, love, fun, lust and the incorrigible Alice Ziplinsky. She is not a true Ziplinsky not having been born into the family but married into it. Hired fresh out of Wilbur Cross High School to work on the Zip's Candies Factory floor, Alice diligently approached her tasks in the summer of 1975.

On her first day at work after five minutes she had just about mastered the art of "separating and straightening the Tigermelts" when Alice looked up and saw for the first time her future ex-husband, Howard Ziplinsky, son of the firm's founder, Sam, and his grumpy wife, Frieda. Founded in 1924 Zip's did well with
the manufacture of sweets, especially Little Sammies, so named because the elder Ziplinskys learned to speak English by reading Little Black Sambo.

However, success was not to last because a few bad decisions, such as the production of "Bereavemints," which had a deleterious effect on the mourners and led to lawsuits. Plus, Zip's was small and could be eaten alive by conglomerates and other hungry giants. Is it curtains for Zips?

But first some history - Alice (who inherited the majority of the company) has been through many years of psychoanalysis and now feels fully prepared to dissect and describe the family's ids and idiosyncracies in an effort to retain control of the business. That makes for an amazing story that includes the use of slaves on a cacao plantation and involvement with the Jewish mafia.

Weber fills her tale with a three generational history, smile provoking asides, and a blend of fact and fiction.

- Gail Cooke

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Arson Girl Becomes Candy Maven, February 7, 2010

By 

Mr. August "Literature lover" (Highland Park, IL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: True Confections: A Novel (Hardcover)

Alice Tatnall, a repressed Protestant, walks into Zip's Candies for a job, and becomes the symbol of a hard-driving, smart businesswomen and candy aficionado. Young teen-age Alice has damaged her reputation and entrance into Middlebury College after wrongly pleading guilty to a fire. Her parents are cold and undemonstrative so she easily embraces the owner of Zip's Candies, Sam Ziplinsky. Sam, with some ulterior motives, reacts positively to Alice and she learns the business from top to bottom. She marries Sam's son, Howard (called Howdy) and works at earning her new Jewish heritage.

She wants to be converted into the perfect Jewish mother and wife but to no avail. Her mother-in-law, Frieda, the most comedic character in this novel, will not give Alice a chance. One of the best scenes is Frieda's chicken soup recipe that, of course, is not the real recipe and Alice's chicken soup is a bland failure. The novel is consumed with candy making and the reader learns how this small company manufacturers three profitable products: Little Sammies, Mumbo Jumbos and Tigermelts. In addition to chocolate and sugar, the other ingredients making an impact are anti-Semitism, child slave labor on plantations, immigration, family trusts and the sweat and hard work of the American small business.

Weber provides detailed scenes of candy making, business dynamics and since Alice is the narrator, we learn about it all from her perspective. Alice attempts to give us a fair-sided view of the family. She riles on her sister-in-law. Irene, who has never worked a day in her life, but will use the family money for her misguided causes and resents Alice her percentage of the Ziplinsky Family Trust. The background of the book is Alice's affidavit of how Sam Ziplinksy's will should be interpreted. And there lies the questions of who is telling the whole truth, or do we see things the way we want to see them. Alice has fought all odds, her cold parents, marred childhood, questionable marriage and constant obstacles of her husband's relatives and the business.

I thought Weber did a marvelous job but the beginning of the book was stronger than the end. She tied up some loose ends in the latter chapters, except the plot became somewhat laborious. But through all the travails, we know one thing, candy makes people happy.