The Chocolate Money
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
An innocent little girl
A phenomenal fortune
A mother like no other
Ten-year old Bettina and her mother, Babs, are heiresses to one of America's biggest fortunes. But Bettina’s whole life is overshadowed by that of her beautiful, hedonistic mother, the glamorous but domineering Babs.
At fifteen, Bettina escapes to New England and an exclusive, preppy boarding school called Cardiss, where she hopes she can finally start to figure out who she really is. But while she thinks that fitting in with the other students represents her best chance of surviving the cliques and politics of Cardiss, soon she’s making choices that show that Babs' maternal shadow still looms long over her. Can Bettina ever break free to forge her own identity - or is she simply doomed to being her mother's daughter forever?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is the story of Bettina Ballentyne, only child of the terrible Babs, heiress to a massive chocolate fortune. A precocious 10-year-old when we meet her, Bettina's a careful student of her mother, following her rules (Babs "refuses to have a fat daughter," so Bettina never eats the family chocolate), noting her etiquette reminders (a man who can't afford to buy his mistress really good jewels should stick to flowers), and memorizing her sex tips (the proper terminology for oral sex, Babs advises, is "admiring the centerfold"). In later sections, 15-year-old Bettina's at prep school, where she undergoes the usual harassment by mean girls, discovers a taste for rough sex, and realizes that her roommate's boyfriend is the son of her mother's lover, a man Bettina nursed a crush on. Things end predictably badly, and for all the book's desire to shock (there's a lot of sex and sex talk, and Babs is a bad mother on an epic scale) it never quite does. Babs is too cartoonish, Bettina too blas , and the writing too stilted (a problem made worse by the lack of contractions in speech) for us to care much, sex scenes notwithstanding.
