Book Review: Chocolates for Breakfast, by Pamela Moore

This review originally ran in the Friday, July 5th issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. If you don't already subscribe, sign up here to receive a bi-weekly dose of readerly goodness in your inbox.
Long before Gossip Girl and its gaggles of precocious alcoholic teenagers, there was Pamela Moore's Chocolates for Breakfast. First published in 1956, the novel centers on 15-year-old Courtney Farrell, just pulling out of a failed crush on a teacher at her boarding school in New York. She then moves to Los Angeles to live with her movie-actress mother, where she spends her days with her mother's adult friends who pour her vodka drinks at 11 a.m. "To Courtney," they toast, "May she always rise late to find a drink awaiting her... and amusing men around her." This toast becomes something of a prediction for the rest of Courtney's high school years, as she bounces between Los Angeles and New York City, drinking highballs and smoking cigarettes and starting and ending love affairs and friendships.

Chocolates for Breakfast is a coming-of-age novel of the most interesting variety. Courtney faces the adult world as little more than a child, but as she fakes her way to sophistication, confronting sexuality and alcohol and high society and depression and suicide, she starts to grow into the adult she is pretending to be. Though the writing can feel forced at times, Moore ultimately captures the essence of the teenage struggle to be recognized as an adult. Perhaps this is what makes the novel feel as relevant today as it did when published nearly 60 years ago, proving as shocking and important to today's world as it did in the 1950s.

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As an added bonus, don't miss the stellar forward from writer and bookseller Emma Straub. It's the best kind of foreword, too: one that makes you salivate over what's to come without giving away the story before you've read it. Gold star for foreword-ing, Emma.

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Chocolates for Breakfast | Pamela Moore, intro. Emma Straub | Harper Perennial | Paperback | June 2013 | Buy from an independent near you


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3 comments

  1. bibliophiliacJuly 27, 2013 at 10:02 PM

    I've been seeing this book title everywhere, but knew nothing about the book. It certainly sounds interesting. Plus, the foreword by Emma Straub would be an added attraction; I'm reading Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures and enjoying it very much.

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  2. JessicaJuly 28, 2013 at 9:45 PM

    I think I must've missed this when it ran in Shelf Awareness but I'm happy that I didn't miss this post! Chocolates for Breakfast sounds really interesting since I'm always in the mood for a coming-of-age novel. Also, I love the cover.

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  3. Valor JanitorialAugust 7, 2013 at 10:12 PM

    Masterfully crafted with language that guides without becoming explicit, CHOCOLATES FOR BREAKFAST still manages to feel contemporary more than half a century after its young author brought Courtney to life. Fans of character-driven fiction and '50s-era novels will find merit -- and real depth -- in Moore's work. It's truly memorable.

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