Candy by Kevin Brooks | Dark Chest of Wonders

It's hard to imagine life without Candy. Addiction is a word most of us are familiar with and all of us have his / her vices, fixes we hanker for from time to time. But how powerful can an addiction be and how far can we go to satisfy this burning need? Joe Beck is your average fifteen-year-old teen living a comfortable life in the suburbs of London; he gets by in his school studies and cares pretty much about his music playing bass for a band with some boys from his school called The Katies. But his boring, uneventful life will turn upside down on a simple trip to a doctor's appointment in the city, the day he turns the corner of the street and meets Candy he instantly falls for her. It seems like your usual boy-meets-girl setup, but as Joe gets to know Candy and enters her life, closer, the more he becomes obsess and longs for her, he is initiated into the London underworld of drug, violence, and prostitution, the closer he gets in the way of danger. In Kevin Brook's 2005 novel, Candy, he gives us a view of what forms addiction can take, dealing with one of the most pernicious kind there is: drugs. In a turbulent journey of a love story told from an innocent boy's point of view, we get to see the struggles of Candy, the titular character, who wants to break free from the drug's devastating hold and the miserable life it has lead her into, selling her body in order to feed her addiction. Kevin Brooks