Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains - Softcover

Elderkin, Susan

3.33

183 ratings by Goodreads

9781841152004: Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841152005 ISBN 13: 9781841152004

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2001

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Not since Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum has there been such a sparklingly original and exceptional debut by a new writer.

Theobald Moon hopes to satiate the yearnings of his hungry soul (and considerable belly) when he leaves south London to start a new life in the Arizona desert. Planting a cactus garden around his mobile home where he can star-gaze and practise yoga, Theo provides a haven of security for his small daughter Josie, weaving around her a gossamer web of fairy stories and belief in an ordered universe.

But as his little Jelly-O grows into disaffected adolescence, there are questions she asks which Theo refuses to answer. When the terrible truth emerges, we discover a man whose actions may be reprehensible but who is portrayed with such intelligent humanity that we may find it impossible to condemn him.

Bold, quirky and youthful, there is no mistaking Susan Elderkin’s voice. Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains is an astonishing debut.

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Product Description:

Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains

Review:

When Theobald Moon hits 34, his mother dies and he decides to leave South London far behind and invest in a plot of land in Arizona. The photo he receives of "a strip of grit half an inch high flecked with tufts of grass" makes him wonder if "he'd bought a chunk of sky". Undeterred, he packs up his corduroys, hand-knitted cardigans and a supply of English sweets and heads off. In Theo, Susan Elderkin has created an amiable, vulnerable, fat and funny character, who beneath the "sun's reflective severity" of the Sonoran Desert discovers "a slight stretching of what he presumed to be his soul". Each morning, Theo drinks his own pee and performs yoga amongst his garden of cholla cacti and saguaros in a majestically different environment, which brings great change to the tender Mr Moon. Endearing and gently comic, Theo contrasts sharply with his cynical daughter, Josephine, who's wise beyond her years even at four. The novel follows her development from adoring child into sullen, embarrassed adolescent, with wry and cleverly observed detail and emotion. Josephine delights in her fairytale surroundings until she encounters a pair of golden high-heeled sandals and asks awkward questions about the whereabouts of her mother.

In a surprising but deftly handled switch, Elderkin takes the action to a Slovakian shoe factory where Eva Ligocka is about to fall madly in love with a travelling ice-cream vendor called Tibor, the only man who doesn't smell of leather. In the Eastern European sections, the writing itself becomes more beautifully polished. The fabulous and often hilarious journey that brings Eva to Theo's door is central to the novel.

The title which comes from an invented ice-cream flavour suggests something much more sweet and sentimental than what's offered in Elderkin's first novel. She pulls off the bizarre meeting between the incongruous characters with great delicacy and the book's tragedies are delivered with quiet, low-key assurance. A witty, charming and sensual debut that plays on many English-American differences, especially those around food. --Cherry Smyth

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