2024-01-19
The local chocolate cartel doesn’t stand a chance when Willy Wonka comes to town in this novel spun from the screenplay for the 2023 film Wonka, which is set in the world of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Freshly returned from years of early travels at sea and clad in a very special coat and hat once owned by a magician, the future bonbon baron hopes to open a shop right next to the three renowned chocolatiers of the big city’s Galeries Gourmet. Slugworth, Fickelgruber, and Prodnose turn out to have other plans, but being (along with all their minions) stupid, clownish, and corrupt, they’re only temporarily able to divert the colorful candy king from achieving his dreams. The tale features a cast divided into thoroughly hissable villains and poor but honest supporters, fronted by a properly enigmatic protagonist. Wonka has bottomless pockets full of unappealing supplies for creating morsels with marvelous effects—literally uplifting Hoverchocs containing “microscopic hoverfly eggs” and hair-restoring eclairs that owe their magical quality to a drop of “yeti sweat.” The cast reads as white, with the notable exception of Shorty-Pants, its single cranky, orange Oompa-Loompa, who ultimately saves Wonka from a chocolatey death and winds up head of the brand-new Wonka factory’s tasting department. That doubtlessly well-meant effort to buff up the obtrusively racist element in Dahl’s original at least helps to counter this work’s flatter prose.

A shiny, if superficial, prequel. (Fantasy. 9-12)