The Chocolate Tin

I don't typically write reviews for books that I didn't feel very strongly about, but since this was for a book club and I was writing notes for it anyway, I figured I might as well write them here by way of a review.

General Points (Spoiler-Free)

What I didn't like:

• The main characters. To me, Alex and Harry were, in the end, not that interesting, or rather, the interesting things about them were pushed to the background to focus on their romance which didn't have much depth to it.
• Moments of evocative, compelling writing gave flashes of potential that didn't eventuate and made the less engaging majority of the book all the more disappointing (see Liked)
• The romance was uninteresting. I get that it's a romance novel, but I think this actually did a disservice to the book as a whole because the romance was the least interesting plotline within the book.
• The dialogue. I thought the dialogue was unnatural and overworked.
• Some of the supporting characters. I think the novel would have been better served if it had been an ensemble cast rather than focusing on Alex and Harry. Some of the background characters have plotlines or characteristics that were far more interesting and could have had more dramatic potential, but these are picked up only as they help to serve Alex and Harry's story and then dropped until they're needed again, leaving these characters to be largely shallow stereotypes.
• The whole chocolate theme and plot throughout the book. For a book titled “The Chocolate Tin,” it was essentially a McGuffin to instigate the plot and was largely abandoned for most of the book.
• Repetitive; for example, we're often left with Alex's internal narrative for long pages, but she keeps returning to the same points without adding anything new. I think the book could have been quite a bit shorter.

What I did like:

• There are some beautifully written sequences—for example, the war scenes—that really packed an emotional punch and dug deeper into the historical context of the period setting. Unfortunately, these are not frequent and made the swaths of less interesting sections (i.e., the bulk of them) all the more disappointing.
• The characters' progressive (for the time) handling of some of the social issues presented in the book.

Specific Points
Spoiler
Alex
Alex, in particular, annoyed me quite a bit. I think she was intended to be written as a quote-unquote war-era “girl boss” and meant to be charismatic. But, ultimately, she came across as quite unremarkable.

The beginning of the novel opens with a discussion about how she has to marry, which I feel is incredibly cliched and overdone at this point, and this novel didn't really add anything new to it, and Alex's flippant comments about men dying in the war didn't help to endear her to me.

The core motive for Alex's intense desire to be independent is that she wants to become a chocolatier. The early parts of the book explaining the “King's Tin” and the Rowntree's factory were so interesting and seemed like they would be a pervasive plot point and motif of the novel, but once Harry is introduced, it's entirely dropped until the very end. It seemed so odd because it was set up to be a defining part of Alex's identity. In the end, the tin was merely an excuse to have Alex and Harry cross paths but had very little importance beyond that.

Harry
Harry was a likable character. I like that he was portrayed as moral but flawed. It's about as much complexity as any of the characters get.

Matthew
I have complicated feelings about Matthew and the queer subplot. I picked up on the queer element straight away and was curious to see what would come of it. Matthew and James sort of got the “villain edit” during the main center portion of the novel, which bothered me a bit, but this does improve, and in fact, the treatment of homosexuality in the UK in the early 20th C was actually quite well handled towards the end of the novel, with unexpectedly progressive reactions from Harry and Alex.

However, Matthew and James are largely absent for most of the novel, and when they are, they've not given much nuance or thought until the denouement.

Beth
Beth swans in at the end of the novel and is instantly a hundred times more the cool, chill, charismatic queen that I think Alex was intended to be. But she's there for all of one chapter right at the end, and then she's gone.


Concepts this novel brought up that would have made a more satisfying focus but mostly glossed over instead:
Spoiler

I mean, look, I'm not an author, but I love to read, and as a reader, there were so many other things this novel could have focused on that would have been more interesting.

• Being a gay man during WWI; criminality of homosexuality, what it would have been like to be a gay man in the trenches (more Matthew and James)
• Being a woman in a “lavender” marriage; entering that marriage aware vs. unaware, reconciling unrequited romantic love and genuine reciprocated platonic love (more of an internal life for Alex)
• Women in the workplace during wartime (actually have Alex work towards her goals of being a businesswoman)
• Conscientious objectors (more of the Quakers—I'm biased—and more of the Rowntree's)
• Family obligation and familial love vs. romantic love (Harry and Beth)

In fact, both Harry and Beth, and Matthew and James were far more interesting relationships to focus on rather than Alex and Harry's.


Conclusion

I kind of got the impression that the author set out determined to write a romance novel about the King's Tin and then, while writing it, discovered more interesting stories to tell but was so focused on their original goal that they steamed right past them.

I feel like a far more interesting novel was buried under a steadfast dedication to Alex and Harry's affair.

This makes it a tricky book for me to review. Ultimately, it's not a book I'd have chosen to read of my own accord, but it wasn't bad—I didn't struggle to finish it; it was easy to read—but there were too many missed opportunities for me to really engage with it. It does seem like McIntosh is a talented writer, but maybe this just needed longer in the oven.

I gave it three stars because I don't use half-stars, and two stars seemed a bit too harsh. I'm not going to seek out other books by this author off my own bat, but I would be open to reading another if it was recommended to me.