Lydia's Enchanted Toffee by Neale Osborne

Lydia's Enchanted Toffee by Neale Osborne is an interesting book.  The writing style took a bit to get used to.  It is definitely written with kids in mind.  The author uses a lot of onomatopoeia to help flesh out the world.  It's written from the perspective of a nine year old girl, after all.  The world itself is appropriately named Candi-land.  As I read the book I kept imagining the whole thing as a game of Candyland gone amuck.

The book is an adventure set upon by a group of nine year old girls through multiple countries to retrieve special ingredients for a magic potion to overthrow a despotic ruler poised to take over all of their lands.  Each girl has a special ability they can access through eating a special candy.  Lydia is the one we enter the book through so she is the best fleshed out of the girls.  Each of the others does get fleshed out more as the story progresses, though.

The action is just scary enough and life-threatening enough that it will thrill younger readers.  I got worried a few times myself.  All in all, it was a pretty good book that left me with a definite hankering for sweets after I finished it.