Review
Lois Lowry's adroit satire will enlighten and entertain winning
waifs, audacious au pairs, woeful widowers, punctilious postmasters, relentless
realtors, mixed-up mountaineers, and ordinary children and their parents.
Once upon a time children's stories celebrated spunk, not spite. Intrepid young
heroes and ungossipy heroines triumphed over evil and got lots of fresh air,
wholesome exercise and nutritious snacks in the process. Nostalgia for these
bygone books, and the daycare- and Internet-free childhoods that contained them,
informs the success of recent retro bestsellers such as
A Series of
Unfortunate Events,
The Penderwicks,
The Dangerous
Book for Boys, the Harry Potter series, and the wizarding genre that hatched around it like a clutch of dragon eggs.
Lois Lowry's
The Willoughbys is the latest faux antique to hit...
Beyond the Book
In
The Willoughbys, the highest honor is to have a candy bar named after you, which
leads us to ....
Candy Bars, Fascinating Facts
Chocolate as a drink was a favorite of Montezuma, Emperor of the Aztecs.
Hernando Cortez brought the drink back to Spain in 1529. It remained a favorite
of the Spanish royalty for many years before being consumed widely throughout
Europe.
It was not until three centuries later in England that chocolate was first used
as a non-liquid confection. The inventor of 'chocolate for eating' is unknown,
but in 1847, Joseph Fry & Son -- under the leadership of the original Joseph
Fry's great-grandson -- discovered a way to mix some of the melted cacao butter
back into defatted, or "Dutched," cocoa...
