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I love chocolate and eat some just about every day. Like most people, I never really gave much thought to where it comes from. I really had no idea. I do now, and it gives me grief to know what so many child workers, who are basically slaves, go through to harvest those cacao pods so we can all have a candy bar or a cup of cocoa, something they may never get to enjoy in their possibly short life, since most of them are beaten, starved, and overworked 7 days a week. I will keep eating chocolate,
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A fantastic story about what life is like for two boys working on a cacao farm. I was a little worried that this story would be info dumpy but I didn't find it that way at all. It would be great to see this one in classrooms. I think this is a good story to hand to readers who like realistic stories but want something that's set outside the US, and also a great story for readers who want something fast paced.
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The Bitter Side of Sweet pulls you right in to the contemporary world of cacao harvesting. Amadou, 15, and his 6-year-old brother, Seydou, are at the mercy of the bosses, living and working in a camp in the jungle region of the Ivory Coast. Leaving their drought-ridden village to make money to support what's left of their family, the boys don't realize that they are not going to be able to leave, and are subjected to beatings and deprivation when they don't make quota or are insubordinate in any
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An adventure story about a tough ripped-from-the-headlines topic: the enslavement of boys and young men on cacao plantations in the Ivory Coast, in order to make money selling chocolate. 15-year old Amadou does all he can to protect his 8 year old brother Seydou from the beatings they get when they don't make their quota cutting and splitting open cacao pods all day. Amadou had left home in Mali to work for the summer on the plantation, thinking he would return home after a few months with his p
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The Bitter Side of Sweet by Tara Sullivan is one of the 2017-2018 Vermont Dorothy Canfield Fisher nominees, and rightfully so. It is a novel that will reveal to the reader the dark side of the chocolate industry.
This book had me on the edge of my seat as I followed the trail of fifteen year old Amadou and his younger brother, Seydou, from the cacoa plantation on the Ivory Coast where they've been kept as slave labor. Two years ago they had left their home in Mali, a country suffering under a sev ...more
This book had me on the edge of my seat as I followed the trail of fifteen year old Amadou and his younger brother, Seydou, from the cacoa plantation on the Ivory Coast where they've been kept as slave labor. Two years ago they had left their home in Mali, a country suffering under a sev ...more
The Bitter Side of Sweet is a powerful book and it certainly changed my attitudes toward chocolate. It's well written and it kept me on the edge of my seat to the very end (where the author stopped writing the story for a few pages and got a little preachy about the topic of the chocolate boys.) Except for that bobble, this is a really good action/adventure book. It doesn't delve much into the culture of Mali and the Ivory Coast, but it does what it set out to do.
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