Synopses & Reviews
Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsider’s perspective. This is the recipe for
True Confections, the irresistible new novel by Katharine Weber, a writer whose work has won accolades from Iris Murdoch, Madeleine L’Engle, Wally Lamb, and Kate Atkinson, to name a few.
Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky’s marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip’s Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, where she has worked for most of her life. In True Confections, Alice has her reasons for telling the multigenerational saga of the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in crisis.
Nobody is more devoted than Alice to delving into the truth of Zip’s history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo, from which he taught himself English. Within Alice’s vivid and persuasive account (is her unreliability a tactic or a condition?) are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of Côte d’Ivoire and the Third Reich’s failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews.
Richly informed, deeply moving, and spiked with Weber’s trademark wit, True Confections is, at its heart, a timeless and universal story of love, betrayal, and chocolate.
Synopsis
From the critically acclaimed author of "The Music Lesson" and "Triangle" comes the ingenious, witty, and affecting fictional story of Zip's Candies, a family-run candy factory trying to stay alive after 85 years in the business.
About the Author
KATHARINE WEBER is the author of the novels Triangle, The Little Women, The Music Lesson, and Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, the cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber, and is a thesis adviser in the graduate writing program at Columbia University.
Reading Group Guide
1. How reliable a narrator is Alice? Do you trust her? She observes the hidden meanings and subtle inflections all around her, but is she equally aware of her own subtexts?
2. Can you identify moments in each chapter of True Confections in which Alice adds meaning to what she experiences or describes? Can you identify moments in each chapter in which Alice seems to overlook or gloss meanings in what she experiences or describes?
3. Are Little Sammies racist? What does it really mean to be racist? If you are aware that others may define something you have said or done as racist even if it was not your intention, is it still racist?
4. True Confections is a novel in which there are many instances of lies and deceptions. Alice stakes a claim for her own veracity starting with the title of the book. What is the truth about the history and meaning of Willie Wonka's lovable Oompa Loompas? What is the truth about the runaway boy from the cacao plantation on Ivory Coast? What is Howard’s relationship with his relatives in Madagascar? What is the truth about Frieda Ziplinsky’s chicken soup recipe? Is Alice entirely innocent of the arson charges that seem to be a pattern in her life?
5. Why do you think Alice cheats on her psychoanalyst by seeing another therapist on the side?
6. Why is Alice so eager to become part of the Ziplinsky family?
7. Why is Alice’s relationship with Sam Ziplinsky so much more successful than her relationship with Frieda Ziplinsky?
8. The Madagascar Plan is a historically true though unrealized goal of the Third Reich during the Second World War. Were it not for Julius Czaplinsky’s ambitions when he learned of it, which in turn led to the establishing of a Madagascar branch of the Ziplinsky family, what do you imagine Alice’s marriage to Howdy Ziplinsky would have been like?
9. Did reading True Confections change the way you think of chocolate? Did reading the book make you crave candy? Which kind? Did you succumb? Did you gain weight while reading True Confections?
10. What would it be like to have Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky as a member of your book group?
In order to provide reading groups with the most informed and thought-provoking questions possible, it is necessary to reveal important aspects of the plot of this book—as well as the ending. If you have not finished reading True Confections, we respectfully suggest that you may want to wait before reviewing this guide.