Chocolates for Breakfast
A Novel
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3.9 • 11 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“A gem of adolescent disaffection featuring a Holden Caulfield-like heroine.” — Vogue.com
“Once I started reading it, I didn’t want to stop. . . . If your all-time favorite books include works of young-adult fiction (like Catcher), I strongly urge you to take a look." — USA Today/Pop Candy
A riveting coming-of-age story, Chocolates for Breakfast became an international sensation upon its initial publication in 1956, and still stands out as a shocking and moving account of the way teenagers collide, often disastrously, against love and sex for the first time. This edition includes an introduction by author Emma Straub.
Courtney Farrell is a disaffected, sexually precocious fifteen-year-old. She splits her time between Manhattan, where her father works in publishing, and Los Angeles, where her mother is a still-beautiful Hollywood actress. After a boarding-school crush on a female teacher ends badly, Courtney sets out to learn everything fast. Her first drink is a very dry martini, and her first kiss the beginning of a full-blown love affair with an older man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though the vernacular is straight out of the 1960s, the coming-of-age themes in the reissue of this classic from Moore, who died in 1964 at the age of 26, are timeless. Courtney Farrell, the 15-year-old daughter of a Hollywood screen star and Manhattanite father, leaves boarding school to live with her mother in L.A. Beautiful and more adult than child, Courtney rubs elbows and sips martinis with the Hollywood elite. Soon she loses her virginity to Barry Cabot, an effeminate 28-year-old womanizing actor. After enjoying "the marvelous luxury of her own young body," the inevitable heartbreak devastates Courtney, and she begins cutting to deal with her pain. Eventually, her mom's acting career takes a nosedive, and they're forced to move to New York, where Courtney searches for authenticity in a sea of spoiled rich kids and disaffected parents, who have money in abundance but little happiness. Shocking for its time, Moore's debut entranced a generation of teen girls bumbling through adolescence (and even takes credit for popularizing the name Courtney for girls), and will surely continue to resonate with audiences for years to come.
Customer Reviews
a tour de force
looking forward to its coming out again in French, but in the meantime here you have the original US edition. a 16 year old girl coming of age in the 1950s, written by a 17 year old girl and published when she was 18, went on to become an international best seller. Catcher in the Rye meets Dud Avacado meets Bell Jar meets… forget all that, just read the book!