The Chocolate Lovers' Diet (Carole Matthews)****

Carole Matthews opens The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet by saying I’m a bitch.

Bitches, apparently, are people who can’t eat whole Mars Bars, or more than one square of dark chocolate at a time. That’s definitely me. Half a Mars bar or one square of dark chocolate makes me feel sick. As I have emetophobia, it’s quite a big thing for me to be eating chocolate at all, but I still have about four squares of milk chocolate a day. So I can’t be all that bitchy. (It’s not for weight reasons after all. If I ate a whole bar of chocolate every day, I’d probably get thinner. And then I really would be a bitch.)

Yes, I know I was complaining when Dorothy Koomson’s The Chocolate Run was all about chocolate, but this is different. The way in which Lucy, Chantal, Autumn and Nadia go mad over chocolate seems quite reasonable to me, and the girls do have plenty of other outside interests. There isn’t a surplus of film-talk, and all sex scenes (except those involving Lucy’s parents) are done in the best possible taste.

And you can’t really blame these women for needing quite as much chocolate as they do. When you read it, you’ll see what I mean. Crises seem to follow them around. To work; to their parents’ houses; to their weddings. Some of these crises are hilarious: Matthews is a wonderful comic writer. But she doesn’t get much chance to show it because a lot of this book is quite sad. Just because the central characters are totally insane, particularly Lucy, it’s easy to get caught up into thinking this book is a comedy. And then something awful happens, just when you’re not expecting it, and then it all gets worse and worse.

If you’re looking for realism, this might not be the book for you - but, on the other hand, I usually look for realism, and I loved it. Most authors who try to pull anything even vaguely unrealistic hear all about it from me in this blog. But Matthews gets away with it. Her book is just too much fun (apart from the sad bits) for me to care that they should all have been arrested. Besides, they’ve been through so much, you feel it’s time they had a bit of crazy fun.

The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet has some great characters. It’s a bit hard to imagine how the girls became friends, as chocolate seems to be the only thing they have in common, but it’s very easy to believe they’re genuinely close. Lucy is no more intelligent than you’d expect from a fictional girl with that name, and her boyfriend Aiden shares with Aidan from Anybody Out There the bad habit of disappearing when his girlfriend needs him (although both have a very good reason). Chantal is a surprisingly respectable sex addict; Autumn an upper-class hippie, and Nadia a woman of amazing courage and kindness. But they do care about each other. Even chocolate comes a poor second.

There are sections told from the points of view from all four women, but, unusually, Lucy’s is told in the first person (and in the present tense and the others in the third person (past tense). This did mean I felt closer to Lucy than the other characters, but that wasn’t really a problem. If you met the Chocolate Lovers for real, Lucy is probably the one you’d get close to first. Lucy is the comedy character, providing relief when everyone else’s life is falling apart, and often just failing to notice that her own is doing the same. Without her, Nadia’s, Autumn’s and Chantal’s stories would have been so much darker, and, while it might have been a more powerful book, it wouldn’t have been half as fun. We know that chocolate can’t really cure all these problems, but it’s nice to pretend it does.

Maybe the book gets a bit slushy at the end, but that’s only to be expected when there’s a chocolate fountain spraying everywhere.

This is the second of two books, but I read this one first and it works very well as a stand-alone book.