About book The Chocolate Money. By Ashley Prentice Norton (2012)
Another book from the bargain shelf at Indigo, this one appealed to me as a "lighter" read when I read the jacket, a tale of a poor little rich girl and her mother and all the fashion, jewellery, parties, travel and good living. Sure, there are difficulties with being rich, but I figured this book would deal with these in the manner of the Shopaholic books.I found that I was completely wrong. This book had a dark tone, and poor little rich girl is an understatement. The values that the author ascribes to the main characters are so messed up that it is a little far-fetched, and yet I was fascinated. The voice of Bettina when she was 10 or 11 years old did not ring true to me at all - I know she was supposed to be precocious due to her upbringing, but there is no way any 10 or 11 year old would talk/write that way.I liked it - it was a quick read, but it was also interesting and through provoking. This is a tricky one to review because while I liked it while reading it, now that I'm done, it just leaves behind a vague sense of "eh, it was ok." I mean the antics of Babs, the incredibly rich chocolate heiress and definite nominee for worst parent award, are funny and shocking but the evolution of her daughter Bettina, which the book is supposed to chronicle, takes a back seat to Babs' crazy behavior and ultimately leaves the novel feeling rather flat and unfulfilled. A quick overview for you: Babs is a young, single mother who is more interested in throwing lavish parties and shopping than she is in her daughter, Bettina. They live in a stylish home on the Lake Shore Drive neighborhood of Chicago and maintain an extravagant lifestyle thanks to Babs' inheritance as a heiress to a chocolate empire. The best comparison for Babs is one of the Housewives of Beverly Hills: blonde, showy, materialistic, out of touch with reality, etc. In this book, her crazy ideas at first reminded me of Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame; the difference arose though when we realize that Babs is a rather self-centered and somewhat cruel character, whereas I really believe Auntie Mame to mainly just lack good judgment skills much of the time, she's not actually cruel. The blurb on The Chocolate Money compares it to Mommy Dearest which is actually a fairly apt likeness as well. Not all of the novel centers on Babs' spontaneous and manipulative antics though; about a third to halfway through the novel, we skip forward to when Bettina is a teenager and leaves for an elite boarding school. From there we follow Bettina as she tries to navigate this new world without her neurotic mother. However, even though Babs isn't physically present, Bettina can't seem to escape her influence and finds herself reacting to people and situations in ways that she recognizes are similar to the reactions her mother would have. At some point, because I did think this would be a coming-of-age story, I expected Bettina to chose a path. But all she really does is barely toe the line of self-discovery. I get that she's just a teenager and all, but still, I was expecting more. In the end of the book we flash forward to Bettina as a young, independent woman running into a boy that she had some history with from the boarding school. They are rather different and there is some awkward conversation, but it seems like a copout way of forcing some "closure" on Bettina's past. We never get to see her actually choose a path for herself as I thought this book would get around to. With such a dynamic, albeit unstable, mother figure around, Bettina is bound to be influenced in some way but as we see her as a young woman I'm still not sure what that is. She isn't showy with her money, as her mother was, but that hardly gives an entire character overview. I felt like the point of telling this story was to bring Bettina out of the shadow of her mother, but if anything, it just put her more into obscurity. As an entertaining story about the ridiculous Babs, this was great. As an insightful coming-of-age story focusing on Bettina, definitely a miss. It was close, the pieces were there, but I just don't think they were connected or developed enough to give Bettina the strength of character I was expecting to see by the end of this novel. But, then again, I may be reading too much into something that was perhaps meant to be more entertaining than insightful.
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Do people really live like this? Never mind. I don't want to know.
—ash
I kept telling myself it is fiction.
—kotheinhtikezaw
