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    In the Age of Love and Chocolate: A Novel
    In the Age of Love and Chocolate: A Novel
    In the Age of Love and Chocolate: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    In the Age of Love and Chocolate: A Novel

    Written by Gabrielle Zevin

    Narrated by Ilyana Kadushin

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In the Age of Love and Chocolate is the story of growing up and learning what love really is. It showcases the best of Gabrielle Zevin's writing for young adults: the intricate characterization of Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac and the big-heartedness of Elsewhere.

    All These Things I've Done    , the first novel in the Birthright series, introduced us to timeless heroine Anya Balanchine, a plucky sixteen year old with the heart of a girl and the responsibilities of a grown woman. Now eighteen, life has been more bitter than sweet for Anya. She has lost her parents and her grandmother, and has spent the better part of her high school years in trouble with the law. Perhaps hardest of all, her decision to open a nightclub with her old nemesis Charles Delacroix has cost Anya her relationship with Win.

    Still, it is Anya's nature to soldier on. She puts the loss of Win behind her and focuses on her work. Against the odds, the nightclub becomes an enormous success, and Anya feels like she is on her way and that nothing will ever go wrong for her again. But after a terrible misjudgment leaves Anya fighting for her life, she is forced to reckon with her choices and to let people help her for the first time in her life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateOct 29, 2013
    ISBN9781427233226
    In the Age of Love and Chocolate: A Novel
    Author

    Gabrielle Zevin

    Gabrielle Zevin is the bestselling author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow as well as Elsewhere and the Birthright trilogy. In addition to writing fiction for adults and teenagers, she is also a screenwriter. Her books have been translated into eighteen languages. Gabrielle Zevin lives in New York.

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    Reviews for In the Age of Love and Chocolate

    4/5

    43 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Not really sure which of the three books of this series are my favorite. Really like this one but the other two were good to. This book I felt a little more emotionally invested perhaps because the author did a great job of making you feel as if you were right there with Anya as she "grew up". There were some punches thrown in this book that I didn't see coming where as the others not so much. Great book..Great series.
    • 5/5
      Review courtesy of Dark Faerie TalesQuick & Dirty: Chocolate wars, love and death in the Age of Love and Chocolate!Opening Sentence: “I hadn’t wanted to be a Godmother, but my best friend insisted.”The Review:Anya is back in the last book of the Birthright trilogy, and she is making moves to open her club, The Dark Room and to legalize some aspect of chocolate so that she can take care of her family! Wyn still refuses to understand or get over the choices she made in the second book. However, Anya sweeps into adulthood with her decisions and choices in this book. Anya faces sabotage while opening her club, she garners new business partners and makes even more difficult decisions. In the end, it all comes full circle!Usually I talk a bit more about what happens in a book, but I just have so much to rave about in this review that I decided to keep that part short and just focus on the why I love this book! I really enjoyed the first book and to be honest I didn’t quite get why the series was called Birthright other than they talk a lot about her being a Balachine, but a main part of the first book was Wyn and he was a huge focus in book 2 as well. Honestly, I loved them in the first book. I was so rooting for that relationship, but by book 2 I was so over them and I felt like instead of focusing on chocolate and the birthright aspect of this series, we got a whole lot of Wyn and Anya and I was not happy. However, this book brought it full circle. It would be a spoiler to give what happens away but I will say that I was back on board with the romance in this book.Oh yes, I didn’t say it was Wyn. I guess you will have to read and find out. My favorite thing about this series is Scarlet and Anya. I adore that friendship, in fact I think I envy that friendship! Scarlet is such a great friend and finally things start to go right for her. My second favorite thing in this series is Anya and her family! I love the relationship she has with Leo and Netty, and even Mr. Kipling. This book finally brought the birthright aspect home and nailed it. I finally felt that Anya got it and not only did she embrace and help her family, she was embraced in turn by them and it was amazing.I will complain that certain aspects kind of felt unresolved, however that didn’t diminish my love of this book! Anya spent a lot of the first two books with bad things happening to her out of her control and just trying to do the best she could to fix and contain the situations, but in this book even when things happened she was still in charge and it was a thing of beauty to see her grow and change into a capable, intelligent, and loving adult! Bonus, I actually adored her relationship with Charles Delacroix. It was another full circle in the series.This is was a great change from the normal dystopian. There wasn’t some evil government oppressing everyone, it was just simply illegal to drink coffee or eat chocolate. So refreshing and different! If you haven’t read this series, start with book 1, you won’t regret it. Anya is one of my favorite main characters of all time.Notable Scene:“Pip Balachine continued. “We ask you today what we should have asked you two years ago. Anya, will you lead the Balachine Family into the twenty-second century?”I did not want to lead this family.And yet…As I looked down the long stone table at the pasty complexions and light eyes that recalled my father’s, my brother’s, and my own, and unfamiliar feeling began to stir within me.Obligation.I felt and obligation to those men (and women though mainly there were men) that I had been born a Balachine had been the defining circumstance of my life.”FTC Advisory: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)/Macmillan provided me with a copy of In the Age of Love and Chocolate. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review.
    • 4/5
      I was a little disappointed with this one. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but I wasn't as into this one. It still had adventure and new twists and turns, but this one just lacked a little in excitement for me. Maybe it is a good thing that this one wasn't as great as the first two-it makes it easier to say goodbye.
    • 4/5
      Such an out of the box storyline but I loved it. Thank you for ending it on a good note.
    • 3/5
      This is the final installment in the Birthright series. I absolutely loved the first book in this series. I plodded through the second but I had such high hopes for this one. We all knew how it would end, that was a given. However, there were a TON of things thrown into this book that were basically ignored or kinda tied up neatly, too neatly perhaps. The biggest for me was the Russian arm of the Family. Brought up over and over only to be glossed over. Why bring them up at all? Another - Theo! I mean, they were basically lovers and then boom, no more talking to or about him. Yugi- just what?!Her brother and his wife. I'm assuming it all worked out there but would have been nice to know.Gable & Scarlett - barely touched upon. Or even Scarlett in general.Anyways, I just felt like she got bored with the peripheral characters. She just wrote Anya's story and everyone else was just an insignificant pawn. And then tied it all up with a bow. I expected more.
    • 4/5
      This is Book Three of the trilogy that began with All These Things I’ve Done and Because It Is My Blood set in a future New York in which alcohol is legal but chocolate is banned, except for medicinal uses.As this book begins, Anya turns 18 and also opens her first “medicinal” cacao bar with her partner, Charles Delacroix. The club is a resounding success, especially once Theo arrives from Mexico with supplies of high-quality cacao and the expertise of how best to process it. But Anya’s problems aren’t over. The other chocolate purveyors don’t appreciate her moves to make chocolate legal, and she makes a very powerful personal enemy after she allies with the Japanese chocolate boss, Yuji Ono. And then there is the matter of her personal life: it’s a mess, and she thinks she doesn’t care. But there are too many people who love her, and think otherwise.Discussion: These three books, All These Things I’ve Done, Because It Is My Blood, and In The Age of Love and Chocolate, are marketed as a YA dystopia trilogy. They could easily have been one book, had it not been for the undeniable popularity for publishers of the trilogy. I also think they are not just YA books. And finally, to define this set as a dystopia is, in my opinion, a serious stretch.The major leitmotif involves chocolate and is very cleverly employed. At the beginning, in spite of being a family defined (in many ways) by chocolate, Annie has never liked it, always fixating on the bitter tones. But by the end, Annie learns to pick out the sweetness, and this is the true lesson of this story. But I believe the most defining element of these books is the love that binds Anya, her older brother Leo, and her younger sister Natty. The different kinds of love and trust Anya learns to feel for the other people in her life is a second strong theme.Anya’s heart has been hardened; too many people she loved have died, some of them even because of her. As Win, the boy who loves her, observes: “...people who know you have a disturbing tendency to end up with bullets in them.” In fact, one of the most touching passages in the books is when Win (who got shot in the leg because of Anya) tries to explain to Annie what love really means:“You used to say I didn’t know what love was. But I think I learned what it is. I learned it when I thought I had lost you over the summer. And I learned it when my leg ached something awful. And I learned it when you were gone and I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again. And I learned it every night when I’d pray that you were safe even if I never got to see you again.”Natty tells her sister she is like the element Argon:“‘Argon is totally inert. Nothing affects it, and it has a hard time forming chemical compounds, i.e., having relationships. It’s a loner. It doesn’t ask for anything from anybody. It reminds me of you.’‘Natty, that isn’t true. Things affect me. I’m upset right now.’‘Are you? It’s hard to tell, Argon,’ Natty said.” Perhaps the most interesting relationship in the whole saga is the one between Anya and Win’s father, whom Anya refuses to address as anything but Mr. Delacroix. The complex and touching growth of their relationship is really the heart [double entendre] of this story. The two of them start out as adversaries, and end up more like father and daughter in an affecting, poignant evolution. Evaluation: In my original reading of book one, All These Things I’ve Done, I took the marketing at face value, and judged this book as the beginning of an alleged dystopia. But the series turned out to be much more than that. It’s a serious and heart-melting look at different forms of love, from the love between best friends, to the love between family members, to different possible relationships between two consenting adults. As a bonus, you learn a great deal about the harvesting and nurturing of chocolate.
    • 4/5
      Things just aren't meant to come easily to Anya Balanchine. In the final installment of the series, Anya teams up with her nemesis Charles Delacroix to open up cacao bars (available by prescription only) to find a way to have chocolate eventually be a legal enterprise. Theo arrives from Mexico, with important stores of cacao ready for Anya to use in her first business, the Dark Room. Anya creates a real sense of hope for the "family" and even though she denies wanting to lead, proves again and again she'd be ready for it. This was an intriguing series, not quite a true dystopian, but definitely a bleak view of the US, 100 years hence. And a young woman out to change things for the better.