Product Description

Vivian Gandillon relishes the change, the sweet, fierce ache that carries her from girl to wolf. At sixteen, she is beautiful and strong, and all the young wolves are on her tail. But Vivian still grieves for her dead father; her pack remains leaderless and in disarray, and she feels lost in the suburbs of Maryland. She longs for a normal life. But what is normal for a werewolf?

Then Vivian falls in love with a human, a meat-boy. Aiden is kind and gentle, a welcome relief from the squabbling pack. He's fascinated by magic, and Vivian longs to reveal herself to him. Surely he would understand her and delight in the wonder of her dual nature, not fear her as an ordinary human would.

Vivian's divided loyalties are strained further when a brutal murder threatens to expose the pack. Moving between two worlds, she does not seem to belong in either. What is she really--human or beast? Which tastes sweeter--blood or chocolate?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14144 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-07
• Released on: 1999-09-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
Characterizing the adolescent experience as monstrous is not exactly a new idea. M.T. Anderson's woefully confused teen vampire in Thirsty and Jean Thesman's reluctant young witch in The Other Ones serve as excellent examples of this metaphor set to fiction. But no one really captures how our hormones make us howl as well as Annette Curtis Klause. Blood and Chocolate chronicles the longings and passions of one Vivian Gandillon, teenage werewolf. Her pack family, recently burned out of their West Virginia home by suspicious neighbors, has resettled in a sleepy Maryland suburb. At her new school, Viv quickly falls for sensitive heartthrob Aiden, a human--or "meat-boy," as her pack calls him. Soon she is trying to tame her undomesticated desires to match his more civilized sensibilities. "He was gentle. She hadn't expected that. Kisses to her were a tight clutch, teeth, and tongue... His eyes were shy beneath his dark lashes, and his lips curved with delight and desire--desire he wouldn't force on her... he was different." But Vivian's animal ardor cannot be stilled, and she must decide if she should keep Aiden in the dark about her true nature or invite him to take a walk on her wild side.

Klause poetically describes the violence and sensuality of the pack lifestyle, creating a hot-blooded heroine who puts the most outrageous riot grrrls to shame. Blood and Chocolate is a masterpiece of adolescent angst wrapped in wolf's clothing, and its lovely, sensuous taste is sure to be sweet on the teenage tongue. (Ages 13 and older) --Jennifer Hubert

From Publishers Weekly
When a 16-year-old werewolf falls in love with a human, she begins to live uncomfortably between two worlds. Klause propels her bloodthirsty tale with "darkly sexy prose and suspenseful storytelling," said PW. Ages 14-up.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up. In the thick of her pack's leadership struggle, a 16-year-old werewolf complicates matters by falling for a human "meat-boy." A provocative exploration of a young woman's psyche in the flesh and "in her pelt."
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

An underrated, good read
I think this is a good under rated book for teens who are into dark fantasy and romance like Twilight. The story is centered around Vivian, who lives with her werewolf clan while they try to coexist with humans. It shows the character change as Vivian goes from hating and feeling superior to humans and then leveling with them.

This may just be the nerd in me speaking but I find werewolf novels to have less logic problems than vampire novels. For example - in a vampire novel, what would happen if a vampire sucked another vampire's blood? Or what about someone with a blood-related disease? So I tend to prefer werewolves in the long run.

I know the ending is rather controversial with people simply because it fails to be cliched. The heroine does not end up with her first true love and the message may come out mixed. Does this mean that love can conquer all or does this try to give teens a better message about the real world? Love is wonderful but it can't conquer real issues like debt for example, which is one of the biggest causes of divorce in America. I'm a realist so I prefer this ending rather than the lovely dovey, pink bubbles and hearts endings that seem so popular now.

Plot: B Okay, so the basic story "human meets creature" is overdone but the spin, especially the end is good.
Characters: A The main characters have different sides and they're rounded out.
Readability: A It reads simple and sweet.
In short: A Buy it. Its a nice good read.

Stick with your own kind?
Ultimately this book had promise. It started off well and the characters were engaging, but it started to fall flat when the romance between Vivian and Aiden suddenly happened with little to no build up. But that seemed to be the case with the entire story. None of the action had much tension. Furthermore, characters were introduced with little purpose that left me wondering why they were brought into the story. Scenes were included that didn't facilitate the plot (the one at Aiden's house with his father in particular). And shouldn't something have happened between Vivian and Kelly? What was the point of having tension between them if it was never going to go anywhere? On top of that, the behavior of the characters seemed inconsistent, particularly that of Aiden, who in the end acted nothing like one would expect.

Which brings me to the ending. --Spoiler-- Like the previous reviewer pointed out, the message was essentially "stick with your own kind." It's not that I think every story needs a happy ending. I wouldn't have had an issue had it just not worked out between Vivian and Aiden, even if the reason was the same (that Aiden couldn't handle the truth). But the ending essentially reaffirmed his prejudice by showing Vivian choosing one of her own kind - and one she hadn't shown any interest in for the entire story - because that was who she "belonged" with. That's a weird message to leave your readers with.

Overall, this book started off well, but lack of suspense, inconsistent characterization and an ending that left a bad taste in my mouth made it not quite the supernatural-thriller-romance I had hoped for.

Not terrible... until you get to the end
Annette Curtis Klause, Blood and Chocolate (Laurel Leaf, 1997)

After all the flap over the film version of this novel (and its subsequent bombing at the box office), I figured I'd give the book a shot to see just what all the fuss was about. And fussworthy it is, though I'm not entirely sure I found it such for the same reasons as most folks. I will warn you at the beginning of this that in order to talk about what really bugged me about this book, I will have to reveal its ending, in part; I will cloak it as much as possible, but certain portions of this review could be considered major spoilers. Thus, if you are planning on reading the book and haven't yet, skip to the last paragraph.

Vivian Gandillon is a werewolf. At the opening of the book, her pack's inn is set afire, and the surviving members of the pack are forced to flee; they end up in suburban Maryland. (Yes, suburban Maryland.) Everything's going about as well as can be expected until Vivian meets Aiden, a human high-school student with whom she instantly feels a connection. Soon, they're dating and the inevitable question arises: should she reveal her true nature to him, or keep it a secret? Would he accept her and love her for what she is, as no human has loved a werewolf as long as the pack's memory can discern?

All well and good, and the book does seem as if it's going toward the whole Romero-and-Juliet "love as thou wilt" path, but Klause does a one-eighty at the end of the book and drops the "loving outside your [race, creed, color, fill in the blank] is bad, mmmkay?" moral in our laps. I really had hoped, as human beings, we'd gotten past that sort of neanderthal thinking. What had been a previously interesting, if not terribly well-written, novel suddenly, in its last few pages, turned deeply offensive. It's probably worse that in order to do so, Klause had to have her main character also do a one-eighty and simply give up all her beliefs in order to make the moral work. (She does give a reason for this, but it's a bit of a stretch, to understate the case.) I just couldn't bring myself to buy it, though it did fit in with many of the book's other flaws, such as its inconsistent characters and generally loose, lackadaisical writing style.

Still, despite all this, as with most plot-based books of this stripe, it's written in such a way that one can't help but keep turning pages in order to see how this is all going to come out. (This, again, makes the ending all the more of a pain; you've gone through all this to get to... that.) And because of this, I've certainly read worse books in the recent past, from the point of readability; I can't think of one, however, that seemed as much of a letdown as this one was. **