The universe is full of aliens and the tiny planet we call Earth has only one export of any value … chocolate. And when chocolate is a hot commodity galaxy-wide, someone who knows how to work with it will be in demand.

Bo Benitez is a culinary arts student but she becomes a criminal when she steals some cacao plants from a well-fortified plantation. There are some in the galaxy who think that chocolate should be made available to anyone who wants it and not controlled only a few. Bo agrees, but now is being hunted for her theft of the valuable chocolate plants.

Along with her boyfriend (from another world) and a alien, reptilian cop, Bo escapes on an unmarked starship. This should be good … except the starship is owned by an alien race that eats their stowaways! It doesn’t seem like things could get much worse for Bo and friends when Bo learns a secret about a threat against the earth.

The premise here is really fantastic. Having a galaxy-wide export that really is something that is likely unique to our earth makes a tremendous amount of sense. And having our protagonist as someone who is learning to work with that commodity also makes sense.

But the execution of this great idea is just a bit clumsy.

Bo Benitez is mostly a good protagonist here. That she is a Latina is also a really nice idea – I can’t think of too many Latinos/Latinas that are leading characters in modern sci-fi/fantasy. But this book tries to do a little too much.

We’re introduced to a world in which there are vast numbers of aliens, but life on Earth doesn’t seem too different from what we experience today. It’s only when Bo gets off planet that we get a sense of how different this world and this time is. This is rather a big and abrupt change – the world-building here just isn’t smooth.

Aliens who eat their stowaways. Okay. Is this a completely foreign concept to Bo and the cop? Or was this something they knew might be a possibility? Either way, we don’t really get the right reactions and the behaviors of our protagonists just don’t really add up. And frankly, I’d like to have seen more actual work with the chocolate … they way we were set up in the early chapters. Perhaps, though, we will see more of that in later books.

I’ve looked through the other responses to this book on Goodreads. Many people are really put off by the author’s use of a mix of English and Spanish. While it did bother me to some degree – mostly because I don’t speak any Spanish – I thought that a book, set in the future, with a Latina protagonist, absolutely should have a mix of Spanish and English! Our language changes all the time and it seems perfectly natural that we’ll evolve into a blend of Spanglish sometime. Still…it doesn’t make for any easier reading.

There’s a great idea here, with an interesting leading character. We just need a little tighter writing and editing.

Looking for a good book? Free Chocolate by Amber Royer has promise and potential with many good things going for it, but it falls just a little short of being a recommended read.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

The writing is incredibly obnoxious. Bo and her mom both speak half in English, half in Spanish, but the Spanish words are always translated, either for the purposes of non-spanish speakers around them, or just in Bo’s inner monologue. This leads to a novel that literally stutters if you understand even minimal Spanish or even just understand the way humans speak. I was excited by the idea of a latina heroine, and wouldn’t have minded the Spanish words – coming from a bilingual family myself, I hear myself doing it all the time – but in writing it keeps tripping me up and making impossible to concentrate on anything but linguistics. Perdón. Sorry.

Ah, chocolate. It must be one of Earth’s finest natural creations, right? That’s the premise underlying this charming YA novel in which First Contact with all those alien worlds out there is not for the purpose of cultural exchange, mathematical enlightenment, military domination, or any of the hundreds of rationales. It’s to raid Earth of its chocolate! Well, and a few other things, too, like coffee and vanilla beans.

Within a short time, humans and alien races are mixing freely, some combinations with more success than others, and chocolate production is rigidly controlled by a huge corporation, HGB – Hershey, Godiva, and Bissinger -- which “sprouted in the wake of the First contact War. They quietly made proprietary trade agreements with other planets…making it the most powerful organization ofn the planet.” Bodacious Benitez is living her life as a student, dating a gorgeous guy from Krom (whose irises change color depending on his emotions), when she’s catapulted into an interplanetary scheme to liberate chocolate. Her mother hosts an immensely popular cooking show, bolstering the HGB image.

The most charming aspect of the book, however, is its use of language. It’s told in first person, as is much YA today. Bo is fluent in several languages, notably English, Spanish (her birth language), and Portuguese. This makes sense when you think about it because most cacao-growing regions are Spanish or Portuguese speaking. Bo liberally strews her English with words in Spanish and teen-speak:


I need a hot shower and un poco alone time with Love Hurts, my favorite flufferiffic soap opera – a guilty pleasure Brill knows nada about.
Icy certainty settles in my stomach. I am muerto. Pero, I keep fighting the womborg [a wombat cyborg] anyway.

“Mamá, I only tell the celebarazzi things like how unfair it is that the chocolatiers have to work and extra hour…”


On the down side, the deliciousness of the language forced me to read more slowly than usual. Although most of the meanings can be deduced from context, I kept consulting my Kindle dictionary to get an added bit of certainty. This, combined with the length of the book, had the effect of flattening the dramatic intensity. There’s plenty of action in the story, but it takes place over such a stretched-out length that the overall shape of rising tension and climax, etc., is diminished. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the hours spent with Bodacious, Brill, and their friends.

This highly underrated book is among my favorite sci-fi reads this year! Free Chocolate is a space opera set around 150 years into the future, where Earth has chocolate as their main export and must protects its seeds from aliens at all costs, even if it means keeping your borders closed and animosity at high level. The story follows Bo as she plans to steal cocoa beans with the help of her boyfriend Brill, who is a Krom, the alien species who first invaded earth and stole coffee beans. 
This universe is really cool! If you love adventure, chocolate and some political drama, I think you'll like this book very much. The main character is a Mexican girl who also lived in Brazil, and there is lots of Spanish here and there, which gave the narrator such a unique voice. But I did find her a bit too interjecting, which broke the narrative for me, but I do understand - she was after all in danger all the time, and who wouldn't be constantly screaming at that?

Characters from Earth (and also Brill) have sublingual communication devices, meaning they get calls inside their ears a lot, which created for me some confusion during the reading. Bo will be running for her life and take a call from her mom and try to sound chirpy, or will be half dead and take a call from her friend to solve another problem... my point is, it made the subplots mix up a little and required quite some attention to keep up. It was not a very "unputdownable" book either, so I think it won't be a book everyone will love. It could surely have been shorter.

But I did love it, I loved the politics, I love the Krom species and how close to earthlings they were, but also completely different. I don't approve of Brill, but that is my personal thing. I think Bo deserves better.

In any case, the plot was great, the complexity of relationships between species was great and I love the whole chocolate-centered economy. I also loved all the Brazil mentions hehehe and now I'm craving moqueca de camarão as well. This book requires a little patience, but it's totally worth it!

I must have eaten two chocolate bars while reading it (and writing this review is making me crave more chocolate)!

After the alien Krom made first contact Earth was left with one unique commodity, chocolate. Everyone in the galaxy adores the stuff and will do whatever it takes to get their hand equivalents on it. To protect itself Earth has closed its doors to the greater universe, no aliens allowed. In light of that and recent pirate attacks resulting in the accidental destruction of a civilian ship by and HGB pilot, culinary student Bodacious Benitez is summoned back to Earth to serve as the face of HGB, the Princess of Chocolate. Face of the company or not Bo has long disagreed with HGB’s methods and, with her Krom boyfriend’s help, is going to do everything she can to break HGB’s monopoly and bring chocolate to the universe.

I have a lot of thoughts on Amber Royer’s Free Chocolate. There was a lot of stuff that I feel like could have been fun and some stuff that I feel like needed more focus to work at all. More than anything, I feel like the book lacks focus. There are a number of places in Free Chocolate where it feels like Royer had three or four ideas for a book but not enough for any single one of them, so she kind of stitched them together. Things happen and don’t seem to have any consequences. There’s some stuff that gets talked about not at all, but then both Bo and the reader are expected to just roll with it. It feels disjointed.

A lot of this is down to how the book deals with its timeline. It takes ages for Bo to actually get into space and on the run from Tyson, the space cop, and then it seems like the action is constantly interrupted. There’s the corporate assassin who calls Bo repeatedly to remind her that there’s only so long until he has to hurt her family. There’s cooking for aliens while on the run and being terrified of said aliens. It slows things to a crawl and makes the book super easy to put down

There is also a linguistic thing that I feel slows Free Chocolate down as well, it also contributed to it being pretty easy to put down. There’s a number of alien languages mentioned as being spoken and a handful of words used when Bo doesn’t know them. It’s just sort of tagged and let go. But then Bo is a native Spanish speaker so, while I would expect some Spanish to be used, it’s done largely in a way that feels like the author is reminding the reader of that rather than as a natural part of how she talks. It’s this sort of immersion breaking thing that Bo never says but or head, it’s always pero or cabeza, or she’ll use a phrase and then immediately provide the translation. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that a lot of this happens in Bo’s internal monologue, so she winds up translating for an audience she shouldn’t be aware of. I feel like leaving the phrases without the extra translation could have worked well. Bo referring to Brill using various terms of endearment worked really well, I thought. It just sort of feels strange that we get more translating for the existent Earth language than the handful of alien languages.

All of that boils down to it being kind of hard to care about the characters and what’s happening to them. Bo is on the run from a massive corporation with an assassin threatening her family and a venomous space cop on her tail. She’s stuck surrounded by aliens that could easily eat her if she messes up while her boyfriend may have been playing her this whole time. All of that, with all the interruptions and characters dropping in and out in an attempt to keep the drama level high, and I really just could have cared less. Like, the pilot who’s accident kicked off the plot, he’s given this level of importance within Bo’s story that is usually saved for major side characters, love interests or best friends. But after she leaves Earth, he takes a background spot for the vast majority of the story. This is the guy she’s essentially willing to trade her life for, they knew each other for two or three days, tops. Brill, the alien boyfriend, swaps between being super loving and sketchy to no end. It’s like the story couldn’t make up its mind about if he was one of the antagonists, just using Bo to get a hold of the cacao beans, or if he legitimately cares about her and is doing something at least sort of heroic. That leaves the reader to decide about him right up until the end, but then there’s this attempt at explaining his behavior in context of Krom society, but he had not wanted to talk to Bo about Krom society so neither she nor the reader knows anything about it until then. It just doesn’t work for me. I’d have liked to have seen more of the space cop, especially the post Bo stowing away version of him, and Chestla, the cat girl TA, though. They were pretty entertaining.

The galley crew on the Zantite ship were also interesting and I found myself enjoying the cooking segments. Talking about cooking and food were the parts where Royer’s writing shines best. If this had been more of a science fiction cozy mystery thing and focused more on the food and cooking I think it could have worked better, those scenes are just that enjoyable.

That’s where I land on Free Chocolate I think. There are a lot of first novel issues here, largely in the character work and how scattered the overall plot can feel. There are the bones of something good here, but it exists in the small moments where Bo is allowed to be a chef and interact with other characters on that level. I could see Royer handling the grander scale, galactic conflict stuff after she’s written more fiction. That said, this is a book that I found incredibly easy to put down in favor of doing any number of other things. So, I’m giving Free Chocolate a two out of five with the note that, while I’m not likely to read the inevitable sequel, I might check out another one of Royer’s books later on in her writing career.

You know, this is an absolute hot mess of a book with an incredible, life-changingly-good premise. Five stars for the premise ... and fewer stars for the execution. But still, this book needed to be in my life and I don't regret paying money I don't really have in order to buy it. I really look forward to seeing what else Amber Royer has in store for us!

Latina space opera with aliens and chocolate, literally. YES, bitches! Write more! This was the most fun space opera I've read in years, and this coming from someone who's read a shit ton of John Scalzi lately. Diversity, a FUN plot, interesting world building, and excellent characters - what more could I want? Just MORE! Write more of this, please.

Not quite my cup of tea, but very well written and alot of fun to read, and FUN is always good. I will check out further books from Ms. Royer

Earth has the monopoly on chocolate, because it controls the source. That means it is a highly sought-after commodity that everyone, literally, wants a piece of. When culinary student Bo Benitez gets it into her head that everyone should be entitled to this tightly controlled commodity she turns to theft. But after being caught stealing a cacao pod, she has to make a fast and very messy escape and go on the run. Being brought back for trial is the least of her problems as Bo encounters a raft of bizarre and hungry aliens for whom chocolate is not the only gourmet delicacy they would like to savour.

I don’t think I have ever felt as conflicted about a book. At first the relentless peppering of Spanglish distracted from the flow of the narrative. At times the main protagonist irritated the hell out of me to the point where I wished one of her pursuers would stop messing around and finish the job. But once I settled into the narrative and took a good look at our hapless heroine’s name, Bo or Bodacious, I began to realise that (in the spirit of Jessica Rabbit) Bo was just written that way. In fact, the naming of all the characters in the book (Crosskiss being my laugh out loud favourite) reveals an author with a wicked sense of humour and warped character development skills.

The Spanglish is an integral part of Bo’s voice in this first-person narrative and is what makes the story work so well. She is an extremely naïve young woman, besotted with her hot, Krom boyfriend (think outward human appearance, but with the book lungs of a spider), Brill. Bo always thinks the best of everyone, until they pull a gun on her or try to murder her in inventive ways and is forced into doing something against her non-confrontational nature.

There’s plenty to go at in terms of tight situations out of which Bo must squeeze by the skin of her teeth. There were so many towards the end of the book I did begin to suffer from peril exhaustion, but that might have also have been due to the stress Amber Royer is a class act at inducing through some rather canny writing which balances raucous humour with downright nastiness.

The aliens are brilliant, outrageous imaginings; the descriptions of which are often at their best just before Bo’s potential annihilation. Take for example the moment at which Bo calmly notes as her head lies in the mouth of her would be consumer that he has rinsed with something mint flavoured after his last repast. This was just one of those little touches which made me hang in with the story, as well as the rather splendid characters, Chestla, the predatory alien in charge of Bo’s dorm and Gideon Tyson the reptilian Galactic Inspector with an atrocious accent, described as an “eight-foot-tall humanoid, fer-de-lance”.

Although there is a serious element to the book, which is exploitation of a commodity through commercial monopoly and one person’s attempt to break it, you do need to read Free Chocolate in the spirit in which it is intended. This means you have to think about Free Chocolate in terms of a mash up of “Barbarella” (without the naughty bits), “The Great British Bake Off” and The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Although I would need to get my breath back if I do get round to reading the next in this series, I would certainly like to read more of Amber Royer’s work, because she has an incredible imagination and ability to pull together some completely wacky situations, juxtaposing outright comedy with nail-biting moments.

This was interesting and the premise with chocolate being a luxury export that people would do anything to get a hold of. The characters are engaging and the world was unique. Overall, it was a good sci-fi read.

This sci-fi adventure is not afraid to be out there. The premise - that chocolate is Earth's only valuable export to a universe that craves it so badly they're willing to kill for it - is so interesting and yet astoundingly plausible that you can't help but read it. But the prose is excellent - even with the English/Spanish language mix - and the characters charming. This is an excellent book!

Link included below. It turns out Netgalley has changed its system requiring me to put a hundred words into this section. I'm not cut and pasting my review here since I've provided the link. Instead, I will just work out some way to fill this space. It is not a change I care for,

3.5 stars. The world building is unique, the pace frenetic and the story fantastically inventive. Bo is a really engaging MC, funny and capable, whilst also continually learning who she is. Although, there is just so much going on in the story and Bo meets so many people that I got really confused towards the end about who was doing/had done what. However, I would definitely read more of this interesting world.