About the book

Sixteen-year-old Kola Mohan livestreams her life from her family’s cocoa estate in Trinidad’s Northern Range, where her Granny’s Sweet Roots cocoa tea is legend and the bank’s foreclosure notice is not up for discussion at the dinner table. Then Kola overhears the number.

Six weeks until the bank takes everything.

When an international chocolate competition comes to Trinidad, with a prize big enough to save the estate, Kola has a recipe, a phone, and the Cocoa Crew behind her. What she doesn’t have is an invitation. The judges are only visiting the estates that have always been on the list, and the woman controlling that list has reasons of her own to keep Sweet Roots off it.

Somewhere in the middle of trying to save everything, Kola’s first taste of love sneaks up on her too.

Winning the regional turns out to be the easy part. The competition carries Kola to Zürich and the Young Innovators Program, where growers her age from Brazil to Côte d’Ivoire know exactly what it means to love a crop the world profits from without them. It also carries her toward the people who have controlled the story of chocolate for centuries: who profits, who gets erased, and who never gets a seat at the table.

What they offer is everything she came for. All they want is the deed, the recipe, and everything Granny told her was never for sale.