Flatlander Emmeline Thistle’s life is not on the right track. Born with a clubfoot, she was left to die as a baby, only to be saved by some free-ranging cows. She has grown up knowing she wasn’t wanted. When her village washes away in a flood, she is swept downstream, out of the Flatlands, and to the Oak’s dairy farm, where, with the help of Owen Oak, the dairy farmer’s son, she discovers she can churn cream into chocolate, a substance long since lost in Anglund. This sparks a series of adventures as she is kidnapped and exploited and learns the truth about her people and the spell of chocolate.
This is pretty similar to most plot synopses one will find about this book online, but it really doesn’t give the reader sufficient idea of what this book is going to do. Frankly, this is not a good book. The plot winds tortuously back and forth, switching back and forth between Emmeline’s point of view and Owen’s (though he isn’t introduced until a third of the way through the book), both in first-person narration, which is jarring. Plot twists are introduced with very little lead-up, making it feel like the author just added them as she went – for example, there is no mention of chocolate or the legend surrounding it until Emmeline actually produces it. Additionally, a major plot point (introduced halfway through the book, of course) is the country running out of coal and the class tensions caused by this, something that is literally never resolved.
This book feels like it is constantly on the brink of getting better, of doing something interesting and unique, but it never quite pulls it off. Readers looking for young adult fantasy can give The Sweetest Spell a pass.
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