Indulgent Sensory Fest (Five Quarters of the Orange - Joanne Harris)

Member Name: sersha

Product:	Five Quarters of the Orange - Joanne Harris
Date:	15/11/02 (216 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: indulgent sensory fest

Disadvantages: tastes like soggy paper

First there was Chocolat, then Blackberry Wine, and now there are oranges. Joanne Harris has been credited with inventing a new literary genre - "gastromance" and I for one am hooked on this indulgent and sensuous feast of a novel.

You only need to look at the names of the central characters to see Harris?s preoccupation with food: Framboise (Raspberry), Cassis (Blackcurrant), Reine-Claude (Greengage), Pistache (Pistachio), Noisette (Hazelnut), Piche (Peach) and Prune (Plum). The novel centres on Framboise, or 'Boise for short.

'Boise is a froggy faced, angular, and devious little torag who is her mother's favourite, probably because she is most like her. Unlike her beautiful sister Reine-Claude, she's never going to make it as the Harvest Queen, but that doesn't stop her dreaming. The only problem with her dream is it involves running off with a German soldier - in the height of wartime?

The book begins with Framboise Dartigen in her later years. She now lives back in the village where she grew up, Les Laveuses on the banks of the Loire. She runs a creperie, using the recipes left to her in her mother's album. Although left the album, she is not the only one to appreciate its contents: her unscrupulous nephew and his wife want to take it from her and use it in their own restaurant, and they threaten to expose her past unless she lends it to them. Even her own children know nothing of her sinister past, and the precious album contains not only recipes but her mothers diary entries and scribblings throughout the war, so she is not going to give it up without a fight. For she is nothing if not a fighter, just like her mother was...

Known to the locals as Françoise Simon, she keeps quiet and hides her true identity from the villagers, in the belief that if they were to know who she was, it would no longer be possible to fulfill her wish to pass her retiring years in peace in the place where she grew
up.

Most of the book involves the story of Framboise's childhood. We are taken on a journey back into wartime France, where she evokes a summer of both ripening berries and ripening passions. The Germans are present in the village, and there is a web of deceit revolving around black market goods and bribery. Mme Dartigen is subject to headaches, which cause her to retire to her room for days on end, leaving the children free to do as they please. Framboise, who as I have said before is a clever but somewhat evil little child devises a way of keeping her mother in headaches by using oranges! Framboise becomes infatuated with Tomas Leibniz, a charismatic German soldier who brings the children gifts of chocolate and magazines in return for information about the villagers. Things start to go wrong when the children are one day witnesses to a murder in the village? I won't spoil the story for you anymore but I hope this is enough to tempt you into getting hold of this book.

I cannot recommend this novel enough. Is an absolute feast for the senses, a real page-turner, and my favourite novel out of all her offerings.

Hardback 12.99 Paperback 6.99
ISBN 0-552-99883-4
Publisher: Transworld (Black Swan imprint)

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