The Chocolate Money

This is the story of Bettina Ballentyne, only child of the terrible Babs, heiress to a massive chocolate fortune. A precocious 10-year-old when we meet her, Bettina’s a careful student of her mother, following her rules (Babs “refuses to have a fat daughter,” so Bettina never eats the family chocolate), noting her etiquette reminders (a man who can’t afford to buy his mistress really good jewels should stick to flowers), and memorizing her sex tips (the proper terminology for oral sex, Babs advises, is “admiring the centerfold”). In later sections, 15-year-old Bettina’s at prep school, where she undergoes the usual harassment by mean girls, discovers a taste for rough sex, and realizes that her roommate’s boyfriend is the son of her mother’s lover, a man Bettina nursed a crush on. Things end predictably badly, and for all the book’s desire to shock (there’s a lot of sex and sex talk, and Babs is a bad mother on an epic scale) it never quite does. Babs is too cartoonish, Bettina too blasé, and the writing too stilted (a problem made worse by the lack of contractions in speech) for us to care much, sex scenes notwithstanding. Agent: Bill Clegg, WME Entertainment. (Sept.)