The Chocolate Touch by Patrick Skene Catling

Daddy's review

The Chocolate Touch by Patrick Skene Catling is the story of John Midas and his love for chocolate. He's obsessed with chocolate and would rather have it than anything. Some magical board of oversight decides to teach him a lesson in gluttony and bestows upon him a gift. Anything his lips touch turns to chocolate. Of course this becomes bad, and disaster looms.

I didn't really enjoy this book. The characters were shallow. The names were unoriginal. The crisis was predictable. This is a book that tried to teach a lesson, and it was a boring lesson. I want tales about candies to be sweet and fun, not preachy. And if you're going to preach about how bad candy and indulgence is, at least make it interesting.

My review

This book was pretty terrible. Although I anticipated a lesson in moderation, I did not expect such a heavy-handed moralizing. The story starts off by describing John Midas as a good boy with one major flaw: he loves candy. He wants to eat candy every single day and he doesn't like sharing it, either! If that sounds more like a typical kid than a flawed one to you then I bet you know more about children than the author does.

John is portrayed as selfish for replacing proper meals with a bellyful of candy, but I don't understand why he even has the choice. His mom makes him swallow gross vitamins every night to keep him from getting scurvy yet she somehow can't convince him to eat a slice of pizza.

The boy becomes cursed with a chocolate touch, where everything his mouth touches turns into chocolate. Oddly enough this puts him in situations with his friends where he's teased or alienated even though I'm pretty sure that someone who can turn random stuff into deliciousness is exactly the kind of person most kids would love to know. He actually transforms a big bucket of water into sweet sweet liquid chocolate and instead of dunking her face in it while screaming with joy like any normal individual would, his (possibly cyborg) classmate becomes angry because some of the chocolate got on her dress.

In the end the message wasn't even effective, because the descriptions of chocolate only made me crave some (for dinner!)