The Candy Store

by Michele Poague

Is Destiny determined by the future or the past?

Ronald Reagan is President and the city of Denver is reeling from the 1970s Oil Boom when sixteen-year-old- Jett finds employment making confections for Watson's Candies. But when tragedy strikes, the hard-as-nails orphan wakes up in the psychiatric ward of a strangely altered word where her very words could spell doom.

The Psychiatrist blinked at me, and just that fast, I knew I must have said something wrong. The clothes, the old cars, the peculiar cadence of their speech; my skin danced with goose pimples and I shivered. I tried to ignore the fear creeping up my back. "What is today's date?"

"October the twenty-ninth," the nurse said.

"And the year? What's the year?" My heart was pounding and I was starting to hyperventilate. Tears flooded my eyes, blurring the scene before me. I was being swept away by emotional forces so strong I couldn't stem the tide. I was so afraid of what they were going to say.

"Why, it's 1927, my dear."

460 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 2, 2015

About the author

My parents lived in Denver in 1956 and often went home for the holidays. My uncle Jim was totally freaked out driving 800 miles, in the dead of winter, through Nebraska farm land, with a woman who could go into labor at any minute, so I was born Michele Rae Jeffryes in Newman Grove, Nebraska.

I grew up in southwest Denver with 5 sisters and a brother. Of course in the 1960's, that meant somewhere near 1st and Federal. Now southwest Denver is closer to Chatfield Reservoir. I was fifteen when I was spirited away by my mother and stepfather to the strange land of Sioux Falls, SD, where I wrote my first short story. It was a paranormal romance about the ghost of a man's first wife trying to kill his second wife. Like so many things teenagers write, it was never meant for publication.

After college, when I was twenty-one, I moved to Las Vegas for six years where I worked in the Bar & Night Club business, and then returned to Denver in 1984. I like the weather here.

I had read the Dragonriders of Pern, and Anne McCaffrey made writing look easy. It wasn't. In the 80's and 90's I didn't have the time to write because I had a house to remodel, a career I had to invent, and a world to change through politics. As a fundraising director I wrote and designed convention brochures, and while working for Shotgun Willies, I wrote training manuals and ad copy. I'm still employed with Shotgun Willies, but my work leans more toward management and accounting now.

Reviews

[LitPick Book Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teen orphan Jett Oxford hasn’t had much sweetness in her life. It’s 1981, and she’s hiding from the authorities, unwilling to go to foster care. Jett wants to study culinary arts, and she needs a thousand dollars to pay for tuition.

The Help Wanted sign at Watson’s Candies catches her eye. The elderly owners, Henry and Jay Watson, quickly hire her and even offer her a room upstairs. The Watsons treat her like family, and Jett loves learning about candy making with them.

Her idyllic world is shattered when a fire ravages the little store. When Jett wakes up from a coma, she finds herself in a hospital in the year 1927! It may seem impossible, but when Jett sees the flappers and Model Ts, she's forced to realize that she really has traveled back in time.

Just as she is adjusting at an orphanage, she comes across a familiar pair of blue eyes – Henry! Jett and Henry become friends, and she meets his girlfriend Josie. Jett is thrilled to meet the fun-loving pair, and she wished she could tell them how wonderful their life will be. But when Jett starts falling for Henry, she is reminded that the Roaring Twenties are not her true world. Will Jett ever get back to the future without damaging her friends’ happy ending?

Opinion:
Reading The Candy Store was like savoring a bittersweet chocolate bar that has a surprise twist in flavor at the last bite. The novel was a delicious combination of sci-fi, time travel, historical fiction, and romance. I don’t usually like time-travel, since I believe it can come off as cheesy or weird. However, in this case it was a clever way to get a realistic peek into the 1920s, a time glamorized by Jay Gatsby, the main character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

It was clear that Poague did a lot of research for The Candy Store. Joan Jett, banana clips, and Sony Walkmans gave life to the '80s. The Jazz Age part of the novel, which readers may be less familiar with, was also filled with references that made the story pop! Classic novels like The Age of Innocence, expressions like “the real McCoy,” and descriptions of plain and elegant fashions help readers understand life in the '20s.

Jett was a strong character who was a good bridge between the '80s and the '20s. She exuded a rebel, tough-girl image at the beginning, but love from the Watsons helped soften her into a kinder, wiser person. I liked how she retained her can-do attitude and showed real willingness to work and get back to the '80s when she fell into the Dollar Decade. The young Jay and Henry were good reflections of who they would grow up to be. Henry was quite charming, and I can understand why Jett was attracted to him. He wasn’t eighty when she had a crush on him! Jay was really sweet, and she best exemplified the era. The supporting characters, like Jay’s mom or socialite Abigail, also showed readers important aspects of the times, like the country’s general attitude towards women working or acting.

As for the ending – no spoilers, I promise! – it was really unexpected for me. I still enjoyed it, though. When I looked back at the first few chapters, there are some subtle clues that are only clear if you know the end already! I was left with a few questions about the finer points of time travel – did she use a Tardis? a Time-Traveler? a magic peppermint stick? – but nothing that left me too bummed.

I highly recommend The Candy Store. It is the perfect novel for teens looking for a story packed with love, friendship, adventure, history, and romance.

Reviewed by a LitPick student reviewer Age: 15

Another LitPick student review
It is the year 1981, and as an orphan with no recollection of her parents, a sixteen-year-old girl named Jett finds herself in quite the predicament. She has been running away from people who are trying to put her back into foster care, and is also attempting to find a chance to apply for college in order to start her career. Of course to be able to start college, she will need money to pay for the tuition. Then she has an incredible stroke of luck and finds a help wanted sign at a candy store called Watson’s Candies. The owners, Henry and Jay Watson, are old and seem quite mysterious and strange to Jett at first. However, she asks few questions when they quickly give her a job and even a room to sleep in and be safe.

During her time at the Watsons, she learns many skills that will help her in life. For the first time, she feels that she has a family. Even though she needs to hide from the authorities, she still manages to get in trouble occasionally. Her life is becoming everything she has ever dreamed of. Jett has a loving family and the opportunity for a college education, when suddenly everything changes.

One day the store catches on fire, and the next thing Jett knows, she finds herself coming out of a long coma. At first, things only seem a tiny bit strange, but as she asks questions, she finds out that she has somehow been transported to the year 1927. This is hard for her to accept at first, especially because she is a fish out of water and has little idea what anyone is talking about.

Even stranger, she finds both a young Henry and Jay! As Jett’s world is turned upside down, she must figure out a way to get back to the 80s and not mess up the 1920s in the process. How can she manage to get back to the world she knows, when she cannot even figure out how she got to this new time in the first place?

Opinion:
This was a pretty amazing novel. There were many stylistic choices I liked that the author made. I loved the use of 1920s slang, and I did pick up a few neat phrases along the way. However, it was hard for me to believe those phrases were actually used that often! For the most part, all the characters felt realistic, although I did not understand some of Jett’s decisions and impulses. I am basically the age that she was in the novel, and I would never even consider doing some of the things she did. But she did live in a different time, so that may account for some of the differences.

I always love time traveling in novels. The author made Jett’s reaction to this change quite believable. She was quite smart in some of the situations she was put in, and thought of things that I would never have thought of. In the end, I felt I could look up to Jett, despite some of her minor faults. Setting the novel initially in the 1980s was interesting, but I guess that makes it easier for Jett not have to cope with the lack of computers or smart phones!

This novel was a blast from the start until the finish. The relationships the characters had with each other were crafted extremely well, and I was very impressed. It is clear the author put a lot of effort into making both the setting and the characters lifelike. Even though I never lived in the 20s or even the 80s, I felt like I was able to briefly be a part of those eras and have fun with characters that were having the time of their lives.

Reviewed by a LitPick student reviewer Age: 17

[Belle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed The Candy Store, it was a lovely exploration of the trials of growing up, fitting in and finding a place in the world.

Watching Jett grow from a rough street kid to a lovely young lady was really fun, especially as it was more a case of her growing into herself rather than having to change to fit other people’s perceptions of who she should be - a mindset she challenged often throughout the book.

The supporting characters were also really fun. I particularly enjoyed the energy in the Doyle family, especially Josie. She was definitely a bright spark throughout the book.

I also really enjoyed the writing style. It was simple and easy to read, which made it very easy to get lost in the story. I don’t want to give any of the plot away, but I do think it was very well-handled, and the contrasts between where Jett grew up to where she landed also meshed nicely. There was just enough sense of “other” to highlight the differences without being jarring.

All in all, a really great book, and one I’d recommend to anyone that likes historic/turn of the century fiction.

[Sunday Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. The dialogue, at which Michel Poague is so adept, rings so true and places the reader in the time period with slang and sentence structure of the era. Poague builds a complete world with strong secondary characters like Briget and Rory giving the book full body. Her main character, Jett, grows and expands from a young runaway who puts a bullet into someone's coke stash to someone who tries to protect an entire family from disaster.

And as has been the case in Poague's other stories, the surprise at the end is subtle but powerful.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

The entire book is set in the mid 1920's in downtown Denver which was really cool for this native!