Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky's greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip's Candies, her husband's family's company, is so much more to her than just a business. In True Confections, Alice looks back on the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in a crisis of intergenerational struggle over succession.

As the outsider, Alice is more devoted than anyone to finding and relating the truth of Zip's history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo from which he taught himself English. Within Alice's account are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of Cote d'Ivoire and the Third Reich's failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews. But at its heart, True Confections is about timeless and universal themes: love, betrayal, and of course, sweets.