The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase

Bring on book two! After all the adventures of book one, how could this book not be as fun and entertaining? I felt it definitely lived up to book one and possibly surpassed the excitement.

The one problem I saw with the book is the intimidating size. My nine year old won't think twice about picking up a 300+ page book on dragons, but I've yet to get her to read The Candymakers nor The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase. Because we read about the adventures from each child's prospective, the book is almost 550 pages. I have to admit, even I thought twice about reading the book when I saw the size. Let's face it, that's a lot to commit to when you're not sure if you'll enjoy it. Despite the size, the book is entertaining. My daughter enjoyed everything I told her about the book and begged me to share more. Perhaps there's hope she'll read it after all.

One thing I really enjoyed about the book was the diversity of the children and the perspectives their differences brought to the book. The kids are white, Asian, rich, poor, handicap, absent parents, helicopter parents, dead parent, and yet friends who work together.

I would recommend this book to anyone who has kids who love to read and they're not afraid to tackle big books. Or perhaps to anyone who just likes to read a good kid centered book.

*This book was initially given to me by NetGalley for an honest review, but the book was archived before I could download it. I pre-ordered the book and read it once it was published.

I had just read the original Candymakers when I had the opportunity to read its sequel. I was not disappointed.

This book picks up where the first one left off. I highly recommend reading the first book before reading this one. It does offer enough background story that you can figure things out for yourself but you will get to know and love the characters and appreciate their situations more if you start with The Candymakers.

It has been four months since the Harmonicandy won the Annual New Candy Competition and the first candy bars are ready for production. Logan's family's factory has won the rights to manufacture the Harmonicandy, making it that much sweeter for the Life is Sweet Factory. The factory is holding a celebration to toast the launch of the Harmonicandy and the factory is swarming with sugar enthusiasts. Unfortunately, Logan has exceptional taste buds and something is wrong with the Harmonicandy that has just come off the line. Logan tells his friends but does not tell his parents, the factory owners, until they can sort out what kind of chocolate went into the prototype and how they are going to handle the violation of the contest rules that the two candies are not identical (no one but Logan and one other person loyal to his family notice the difference).

In the meantime, Logan's father, The Candymaker, has proposed that the four kids go on a road trip to promote the Harmonicandy. Each person from the original candy making team decides to go, but all have ulterior motives. Will they be able to save the Harmonicandy?

I enjoyed this author's use of different character perspectives, much like in the first book. We see the first sequence of events in several chapters from each character's point of view but unlike the first book where we return to seeing everything from Logan's point of view, we adopt a third person omniscient narrator when the entire group goes on the road trip to tell us how events are unfolding.

I really liked this book. I thought all the characters were well developed and the plot was very interesting. In the first book I was a little skeptical of Daisy being a spy and wondered if that was too far out there but it made a lot more sense for this second book. I enjoyed finding out what each character did leading up to the big kickoff at the candy factory and I liked that we learned a lot more about Philip in this book (he is a jerk at first, but as the author warns, all things are not what they seem). I will say I read most of this before bed and dreamt a lot about candy, which made for some interesting plot lines.

Overall, I think this is a great book suitable for all ages. The book has a very straightforward plot and a lot, lot, lot of candy. While it is geared toward 8-12 year olds, I think this would make a fun bed time read (though it might take a while at 500+ pages) for five and six year olds as well. There is nothing I would consider too scary or too mature for younger kids to understand and it may leave them with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. Great story. Look forward to more with these characters.

This is the 2nd book, so read "The Candymakers" first (if it seems long at 400+ pages, don't worry it's a page-turner). The characters are amazing, funny and become very real. I'm not even going to write anything about the plot because I would hate to give anything away. Wendy Mass is our daughters' (ages 9 and 12) new favorite author, they zip through her books and they are a great read for adults too.

My son is 12 and is an avid reader. He is also Wendy Mass fan and read the first book in the series. He enjoyed that book immensely. He also liked her pi in the sky book. He reads several books a week. He was super excited to get this book followed by disappointment later. The book just didn't engage him and he wasn't interested. He very rarely stops reading a book. He stopped in around page 150. I asked him why and he just said the book wasn't good. I think 150 pages is enough to know they like something. We do recommend the first book in the series.

I highly recommend this book for anyone. ANYONE.

I was thrilled to discover the fact that Wendy Mass wrote a sequel to “The Candymakers,” which remains one of my favorite books of all time. Go read it. It didn’t even need a sequel, and yet . . .

This book is BETTER. How did she make it better? I’m amazed. The single downgrade was Phillip using a not-so-nice language word this time around, but other than that . . . c’mon, order it already!

I didn’t consider the lack of the four perspectives throughout the book to be a downgrade. I thought it was done exactly how it should of. It was focused, adventure-filled, and so well-written I actually teared up when I started reading it because it had been so long since I read a well-written book.

It’s got heart. It’s got great characters. It’s got an awesome plot and an awesome adventure and I can’t praise this book enough for just how awesome it is. As soon as your child reaches a reading level where a book this thick doesn’t deter them, make sure they read it because this duopoly is close to perfection.

Oh, and did I mention there’s a lot of candy . . . and chocolate? :)

My kids love this series. Mass writes characters that are real and easy to relate to, and she does a wonderful job of working a mystery.

My daughter (10 yr old) really enjoyed this book. While it was fairly long she enjoyed it throughly and finished it in less than a week

My 8-year-old daughter was very happy to read this. She read the first one that came out.

This book is a sequel to an earlier one in the Candymaker series and this is a time when reading the earlier book would have been helpful as the characters already have established relationships. The premise is the roll out of a new product and this group of friends are traveling to stores to promote it. The advanced readers copy says the book is appropriate to 8 - 12 year olds . This is insane as the book is well over 500 pages with a complexity of language and plot that no 8 year old I know could handle. More for a 10 to 14 year old if they don't mind a plot centered on candy bars. Juvenile for the older kids.

What can I say about this book that will do it justice?
My love for the Candymakers is something I cannot accurately describe. I realized last night when I finished this book, that though I always deem Wuthering Heights as my favorite book, my love for the Candymakers is unreachable. Nothing I have read makes me as happy as these two books do.
I read The Candymakers for the first time in 2011, and since then I have re-read it multiple times and listened to the audiobook numerous more.
I was in disbelief when I saw that there was a second book. Book one ended in such a way as to leave a little bit of mystery, but I never thought that there would be a sequel six years later. I was ecstatic to have another entire book about the characters that I love so well, and I have realized that I would read a book about these characters even if it had no plot.
But The Great Chocolate Chase did have a plot, and just like in the first book it was full of mysteries. There would be little bits of information tantalizingly withheld from you, forcing you to keep turning the pages. Every bit of the story line was interesting; there was no part that I just wanted to skip through, no slow parts that bored me. Every piece of the story line was intriguing.
Great developments came about for our characters; they made some major discoveries that will affect their entire futures. I'm refraining from explaining myself further; the surprise will be so much greater if this remains a mystery.
I love how this sequel followed in Book 1's footsteps; the first section of the book is told form the point of view of each of the four children. It tells the first half of the story from each character's point of view. I love this technique because when you see things from each person's point of view, things just fall into place. The last half of the book is told from everyone's point of view, which only took me a second to get used to.
There were multiple times that this book made me laugh out loud and I just can't recommend this series highly enough.