I Want Candy

By Kim Wong Keltner

Fourteen-year-old Candace Ong is wasting away in wonderland—Eggroll Wonderland, the restaurant where her under-Americanized family toils in San Francisco. She loves rock candy and rock music, jelly beans and jelly shoes—and hangs with her best friend Ruby, whose wild life she envies. Candace wants more than another stifling summer stuck in the kitchen. So when a new opportunity arises, she leaps at the chance—even though it means leaving home to experience a tantalizing, dangerous life far beyond the dim sum ho hum. But the waiting world may be a lot more than one brainiac Chinese Lolita can safely handle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061877612

Kim Wong Keltner

The only thing that keeps Kim Wong Keltner from writing is when she’s trapped under an avalanche of her daughter’s stuffed animals. Keltner is the author of The Dim Sum of All Things, Buddha Baby, and I Want Candy. Tiger Babies Strike Back is her first work of nonfiction.

Reviews for I Want Candy

[wcath · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

After reading Kim Wong Keltner’s new novel I Want Candy, I am confused as to who the audience is for this book. The overly cutesy adolescent nicknames and pop references cause one to think that the book was written for middle and high-schoolers. That is until you run into its adult language and sexual situations. This is definitely a book for adults. I am too old to have grown up with the Judy Blume books so I can't tell how the marketing comparison fits there. I have read Amy Tan, though, and I think the likenesses are as slight as location and ethnicity and are far too little to tout Ms. Keltner's writing as anywhere close to that of Tan. Personally, I liked the book. I think that it needs some help in pacing but overall, it kept my attention and entertained me. I would have been happy with far less of the pop references that will surely make this book outdated way ahead of its time. I "got" all of the references but I don't know that everyone will. The basic story is good but it needs to be less tied to a specific time and place. Since this was my first reading of Ms. Keltner’s work, I am sufficiently interested to look up her previous books and see what else she has to offer.

[priscillamylove · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is pretty much a coming of age book about 14 year old Candace Ong. Having to work at Eggroll Wonderland everyday after school, Candace feel like she is missing out on life.She is very jealous of her friend Ruby (who likes her own tits), and the guys that she sleeps around with.While Candance is put into some sexual situations, she never does give in & actually do it. Preserving her virginity maybe until she is older? The book doesn't really say.The book is filled with a lot of swearing & crude bathroom type humor, calling a penis a one-eyed pinky rat, and other such odd names. When I was 14 we used some crude language, but not ones like in this book.I did not really care for this book, basically because of the language, and this part of the book where her friend Ruby dies in a fire, but then continues visiting & ridiculing Candace as a ghost.The ghost portion doesn't really fit with the rest of the context of the book. Ghost Ruby shows her things that don't make any sense to the rest of the story.

[msbaba · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

[This review applies to an uncorrected proof sent to me November 2007 by Harper-Collins for review:] I Want Candy by Kim Wong Keltner is an honest, comic, sexually explicit romp through the mind of an angst-filled eighth-grade girl growing up in San Francisco in 1983. This is the story of Candace Ong, by day a typical eighth grader attending a private Catholic school, and at almost any other time, simply the Eggroll Girl at her parents’ Chinese restaurant, a position and nickname she’s held since she was five years old.Candace hates her life. She hates working in her family’s restaurant. She hates having parents that can’t speak English correctly. She hates how she looks, how she feels, how she acts. She wants to be like her best friend Ruby. But lately Ruby’s made some abrupt missteps into a world of casual sex, and Candace feels abandoned. Part of her wants to follow her friend’s lead, but there’s also something holding her back. The book takes place in the short span of about five months—the last few months of eighth grade and the long summer before high school begins. Without Ruby to run around with, Candace is set adrift in a bewildering world that changes daily as her hormones rage and her body matures so subtly she’s hardly aware of it. During the course of this book, Candace lives through an incredibly odd, and eventful summer, narrowly escaping sexual missteps much worse than her slutty friend Ruby. At the end of the five months, Candace is a lot wiser—not yet an adult, but no more the child. Keltner knows how to write—her voice is fresh, honest, irreverent, bright, and above all, humorous. She perfectly captures the zany over-the-top eccentric charm of San Francisco, especially from the eyes of a child who takes it all in as if everything about this world were perfectly normal. I found myself more attracted to this book that I would have possibly thought ahead of time. It amused me and made me think a great deal about my own awkward middle-school years—a time as tame as a kitten in comparison to Candace’s, and light-years away from today’s madness. The marketing on the back of I Want Candy likens Keltner’s book to a mix of Amy Tan and Judy Blume. I strongly disagree. This is not the literary fiction of Amy Tan, nor the young-adult fiction of Judy Blume; to suggest that it might be does Keltner’s new book a significant disservice. This is chick-lit, and it should be marketed as such. It also does the book a disservice to aim its marketing toward the Asian-American subculture; this book should command a wider appeal than that. I found the book only very minimally about growing up Chinese-American and much more about growing up in the urban mid-1980s. The only thing about this book that reminds me of Tan is the lovingly humorous depiction of San Francisco and its Chinese subculture in the mid-1980s. Other than that, there is no comparison. This book is also, most certainly, not a Judy-Blume-like novel! Blume’s books have far greater attention to developing realistic three-dimensional characters. Keltner mixes too much chick-lit humor into her prose and story line to make that possible.This book is clearly chick-lit—but with a slight twist. It’s by a woman for women, and it’s certainly got the chick-lit humor and the attitude in spades, but what it doesn’t have is an adult woman in the main role. I Want Candy is written from the voice of a 14-year-old girl. What makes this acceptable in the chic-lit genre is that this particular 14-year-old is living in 1983, so that makes the book the (fictional) reminiscences of a 38-year-old woman—perfect chick-lit age! So, who’s going to read this book? My guess is young angst-ridden mothers of potential middle-school-age children who want to be reminded of how difficult their own days of sexual awakening were way back then—after the sexual revolution of the 1970s but way before Rainbow Party world that they dread awaits their own precious children. These women may want to be reminded that they turned out all right despite all that emphasis on sex…and perhaps, in retrospect, be comforted that their own children will probably turn out all right, too. Another possible group of readers might be young girls who accidentally get their hands on this adult-chick-lit book just to read about their mother’s late middle school years and see that their mothers were not nearly as angelic as many may have thought. Personally, I would give this book a two-stars-out-of-five rating but I’m sure someone who really loves chick-lit might give this a four- or five-star rating—the writing and story are a cut above the rest.