In the Age of Love and Chocolate

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As a reader, I don’t particularly like acknowledgments. As a writer, I must acknowledge their necessity. Thank you to Ash Nukui for advice about all things Japan, and to Cari Barsher Hernandez, Stephanie Feldman Gutt, and Marie-Ann Geißler for their assistance with the German and Spanish translations. Of course, mistakes and liberties should be considered mine.

This is a book about friendship as much as it is about love or chocolate, and for this, I must thank my longtime editor, Janine O’Malley. Ms. O’Malley rescued Scarlet from an uncertain fate and saved Anya multiple times from herself and from the clutches of a disreputable gentleman who shall remain nameless. As readers have noted, the book’s original title was In the Days of Death and Chocolate—the transformation of “death” into “love” may be attributed, in part, to Ms. O’Malley. Such alchemy could not have been accomplished without the additional support of my ardent copy editor, Chandra Wohleber; Doug Stewart, who is as fine an agent as there has ever been; Hans Canosa, who had to endure many speeches from me about feminism and the limitations of the Bechdel test; and, of course, the patience and goodwill of my publisher.

Thanks especially to Jean Feiwel, Simon Boughton, Joy Peskin, Elizabeth Fithian, Jon Yaged, Lauren Burniac, Katie Fee, Alicia Hudnett, Véronique Sweet, Alison Verost, Kate Lied, Lucy del Priore, and Polly Nolan. For a variety of reasons, I am also grateful to Madeleine Clark, Stuart Gelwarg, Rich Green, Carolyn Mackler, Jenn Northington, Shirley Stewart, and Richard and AeRan Zevin.

Finally, I am thankful to the readers who have taken my prickly, pious, ambitious, guarded, old-fashioned heroine into their hearts. Because I am often asked this question, I want to mention that I never saw the series as a dystopia. Aside from a noun or two, Anya’s world is pretty much like our own, and her battle is not against the forces of a terrifying and dehumanizing fictional society, but within herself. How do you get over your past and your mistakes? How do you find light when so much in the world seems dark, and sweetness when so much seems bitter? I ask these questions myself. I don’t have answers, but here is an observation: whether you are fictional or real, the world is as dark as you choose to see it.