Children’s lit has long looked to chocolate for great drama. In The Chocolate Touch (1984), Patrick Catling explores the pros and cons of turning everything into candy. Alex Shearer’s witty Bootleg (2003) has youths profiting from contraband confection when chocolate is banned, while Robert Cormier’s much darker teen novel The Chocolate War (1986) uses school chocolate sales to explore the dangers of standing up for one’s beliefs.
   

In Maggie and the Chocolate War, Victoria writer Michelle Mulder adds to this tradition, basing her novel on a little-known incident in Canadian history. When retailers raised the price of chocolate bars from five to eight cents in 1947, kids across the country protested with pickets and boycotts, forcing shopkeepers to reverse the increase. In fictionalizing this episode, Mulder creates young Maggie, a girl divided by the chocolate crisis: though she is desperate to buy her friend Jo a candy bar for her birthday, and won’t be able to afford one at the new price, her father, a grocer, will be adversely affected by the kids’ actions. By the book’s end, Maggie finds a solution to both problems. 

The novel aims to serve as both history and fiction, incorporating historical photographs and newspaper clippings into the narrative, and appending an afterword describing the actual events. However, while the history itself has the potential to be interesting, Maggie’s story fails to engage: the protagonist and her anxieties about friends and family remain one-dimensional and simplistic. (The simple storyline and style best suit audiences under 10.) This book may inspire kids to find out more about the history, but as a novel it’s not a satisfying treat.