Sweet Nothings

December 15, 2024
Navigating the candyverse, and memory, from Andes to Zero. Perry and candy have a magnetic relationship, inexorably drawn to each other. She's a '90s kid with an insatiable taste for Twizzlers, Swedish Fish, Junior Mints, and just about any candy you care to name--hard, chewy, or melty. Perry organizes the book's sections by different shades; she prefers the colors red and (chocolate) brown. If eating a Twizzler is a devotional, Rolos are abject surrender, an expression of community and unadulterated rapture. But which of the dozens is her favorite? Pleasure, she notes, is circumstantial, so a favorite depends on the mood and environment. Perry approaches candy like a field marshal shifting tactics: different avenues of attack for each quarry. She demonstrates that texture matters, sometime more than taste, as does technique. It's not just the candy that elicits her fealty or disfavor; it's the packaging, too. But the author unwraps much more than a lifetime's fixation on candy. While Perry's accounts of candy consumption are sensual, almost tactile, and indescribably delicious, each chapter is also a pathway to deep recollection of the past, not all of it sugarcoated. Especially touching are reminiscences of her mother, who died young. There is a vein of melancholy woven throughout, leavening the joys. Now and then she engages in rather ideological social commentary, yet she manages to choreograph "the ego and the id in a delicate dance." Perry can tap into the communal candy memory with a fine comedic touch, calling forth many aYes! moment. "Candy is about happiness in the moment--this exact moment, each subdivided microsecond of melt," she writes, "each deliriously destructive chomp." With flair and a winning nostalgia, a certified sugar hound of the first order shares her obsessions.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 1, 2025
Perry wrote of her mother's murder and the long search for her killer in her memoir, After the Eclipse (2017). While the subject of Perry's second book, candy, may seem an abrupt shift, these 100 wide-ranging essays reach far beyond small pleasures. A piece on Andes Mints, for example, brings up a long-ago family feud over "fanciness," and the author's teenage resolution "to be a person who had the knowledge to enjoy fine things and the generosity to share them." Twix's brief entry, on the other hand, acknowledges that Perry is happy to share her lover, "but you're not getting my second Twix." Grouped by color, each candy-essay is accompanied by a charming drawing by Forsyth Harmon as, in a paragraph or several pages, Perry considers sensory aspects of the delicacy, the etymology of its name, and its invention. Some inspire historical dives: Blow Pops, for example, lead to a discussion of bubble-gum flavor ("a vaguely strawberry-ish situation, tempered with unidentifiable herbal extracts") and Milk Maid caramels call up eighteenth-century milkmaids' role in modern vaccination. Fellow candy heads will delight in Perry's commitment to her project, her unabashed loves and unapologetic dislikes, while all fans of creative memoirs will find something to chew on.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 17, 2025
Candies serve as the jumping-off points for these delectable essays from memoirist Perry (After the Eclipse). “Sex and sugar are connected for me,” Perry contends, describing how she relied on the pleasures of Lindor chocolate truffles as a substitute for sex when the stresses of the Covid-19 pandemic left her partner uninterested in making love. She uses the bittersweet flavor of Moxie, an old-fashioned soda, as a metaphor for her ambivalent feelings about her hometown in rural Maine, explaining that while the place still evokes painful memories of her mother’s murder when Perry was a child, its charming provinciality meant that when she returned as an adult seeking relief for a persistent yeast infection, her doctor still prescribed such folk remedies as gentian violet, which cured her and derives from the same plant that gives Moxie its bitter aftertaste. Elsewhere, Perry uses sweets to recall episodes from throughout her life, writing, for instance, that “my mother, who loved a Payday, was 2 to 5 percent more beautiful on payday... when she shook out her curly hair and took me on an early evening drive... singing along to the radio as the light angled down orange into the evening.” The evocative prose finds surprising depth in sugary confections. This is one to savor. Illus. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.