Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The Enchanted Chocolate Pot


Sorcery & Cecelia
or
The Enchanted Chocolate Pot:
being the correspondence of two Young Ladies of Quality
regarding various magical scandals in London and the Country

By Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

It's 1817 and magic is an everywhere. Kate is in London to be presented to society. But she's perfectly hopeless and the only reason she's there at all is because Kate's younger sister Georgina can't have a season before her. While in London Kate is mistaken for someone else by a particularly nasty magic user, who keeps calling her "Thomas", before Kate is saved by the mysterious Marquis.

 Cecy is stuck in Essex and things seem very dull indeed. Until of course Lady Tarleton's niece Dorothea comes to stay and all the young men seem to be falling over themselves in love with her.  Cecy wouldn't think anything of it but she finds a charm hidden in her brother Oliver's room and she can't help but wonder what it's for and who put it there.

Everything seems to revolve around a shockingly blue chocolate pot. A story is told through letters sent between these two cousins.

I have to tell you Patricia Wrede is a favorite author of mine. I read her Enchanted Forest Chronicles multiple times growing up and this was a wonderful step up into a slightly older age category.

I have not read anything else by Caroline Stevermer but I would very much like too.

This book is dedicated to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ellen Kushner and you can definitely feel their influences in various aspects of it. It's a regency story full of authentic feeling characters and slang of the time, that are very reminiscent of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer's style of characters.

It's not a huge book, it's about 330 pages and it's a very entertaining read. I've actually read this book aloud a few times because that's something I love doing.

There are two books that come after this one, and while I think The Grand Tour is just so-so, The Mislaid Magician is as good or better then The Enchanted Chocolate Pot.

Now the next book I post about will most likely be about Life as We Knew It by Susan Pfeffer and also in the next week I will have a guest post. So look out for that.




4 comments:

  1. Yes! I also love this book! I tried the squeal but was a little disappointed, I'll have to check out the third in the series now!

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    1. I really liked the third book and I actually own it so you could borrow it if you want.

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  2. I had people telling me to read this book for years, and when I finally did I loved it! Everyone kept describing it as: "like Jane Austen, but with magic," which sounded really weird :) But I guess that's basically what it is.

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    1. Lol, yeah, it's hard to describe it any other way easily.

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