Rating: 
Summary: Not tasty
Review: Even though I like Joanne Harris' writing, this book alienated me completely. Do not expect the secrets and magic of "Chocolat" or the mystery and beauty of "Five Quarters of the Orange". This one is a flat, uninteresting romance. It is full of cliche, the characters are incomplete and unreal, almost stereotyped (the quintessential lonely author looking for magic in his life, the mysterious widow etc.), and the flashbacks in every two pages are tiring and do not allow the reader to enjoy the plot. I couldn't keep it going. I read Five Quarters after that, and I found it much better. Skip "Blackberry Wine", it just isn't worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: I adored this book--its magic stays with me
Review: For those of you who read "Chocolat" and want to find out what happens to some of the characters, you will learn in an offhand way. More importantly, this book stands on its own. The story of this middle-aged man leaving his dull life (and his ambitious girlfriend) and finding himself by coming to terms with his past in the French countryside is compelling. Harris infuses her books with magic--not in the way that J.K. Rowling does (whom I also love)--but in a way that you recognize that there might be more going on than just we we (the masses) perceive. While this is dismissed by both the narrator and the reader at first, evidence arrives. And the bittersweet ending (in relation to Joe) is lovely; the love story is less interesting.
Rating: 
Summary: A fine vintage with depth of character.
Review: Having read a few uneventful novels that lacked dimension I was throughly delighted to finally have a good read. Joanne Harris teases us with her words - as tasting wine introduces nuances of flavor -only by savoring the subtlety can you distinguish the depth of character. She invites you to re-read this tale so as to grasp further what is being said. To be able to impart something by use of the written word is what one gifted with the ability to use them should be doing. to share lessons learned- but not on a level that offers no surprize or wit or fun or art and creativity. Joanne Harris shares such as well as introduces an additional language and culture to enrich our world.
What or why a person gets hung up on the past...and how one can get moving...is taught by means of gardening...seeds and 'the specials'. You cannot get to where you are going unless you leave. Is it magic that gets Jay into now or is it his participating in life. Thats what you can discover by tasting Blackberry wine.
Also the time-line of the late 1970's is a visit to some of the music that marked memory for any living then. I appreciated her understanding of the senses and how they leave impressions on our synapsis. She obviously is well aware of their role in memory. Her use of metaphor invites thought while she ensures visual pleasantry in doing so.
Rating:
Summary: Message in a Bottle
Review: Having read Chocolat, I realized Harris is a kindred spirit...the sci-fi, the food, the memories, the spirituality. So I picked up Blackberry Wine in a blythe mood, and read it in less than two days. I really didn't want it to end: Jay, the hero, had a tumultuous coming of age in mystical setting with an old crank Joe as the teacher-wizard, with his incantations, his fantastical seeds, his potions (wines). The story flashes back and forth between these idyllic summers and Jay's deflated present of 1999, as a burned out writer who throve on the memory of those same summers. He cracks open Joe's old '75 wines and Joe is brought back, verily a genie from a bottle, as Jay's muse, and an adventure living in the village of Lansquenet ensues. The story stirred me on many levels, particularly the gilded, bittersweet summers as a young teen, that we all wish we could bottle and save like the Specials, to re-open and re-immerse ourselves in again. A great read.
Rating:
Summary: Swampwater
Review: I haven't read Chocolat, but I've seen the movie. It was good. Because of this, I naively assumed that the book must be even better, but after reading Harris' follow-up novel, Blackberry Wine, I know now that it must be a case of the movie surpassing the novel.
This book is terrible. Start to finish. I did not enjoy reading it, and I only finished it out of some absurd loyalty. To be perfectly honest, I am amazed that Harris wasn't embarrassed to put her picture on the bookjacket. It made me cringe, the open innocence to such a piece of shoddy crap. By the way, I'm relieved that Harris has overcome her dilemma and decided to live in London, despite being half-French. Misplaced modifier, or simply irrelevant...? Can't decide.
Her bloody main character, brilliant but apathetic writer (oh, marks for originality) Jay MacKintosh is so one-dimensional that I quickly stopped caring why he did things. His only consistency is his anger which, curiously enough, never fails to be misdirected. Harris takes up the omniprescent narrative with other characters infrequently, and always when it seems awkward, unnecessary, and unexpected. Just as she does with Jay, Harris is always careful to bore the reader during these annoying passages by telling them exactly what the character feels, instead of showing them. Basic rule of writing, hello? Basic education. Yes, admittedly we are inside the character's head, but, for Someone's sake, write it creatively or trash it altogether.
Anyway, there's not much to the story. Harris herself can't seem to decide what genre she's writing in, and I strongly suspect that she had Jay Mackintosh emulate her stream of consciousness writing style without the afterthough of editing, only he seems to be more successful at it than his careless creator. Unless the British spell "notice" as "notoice", I believe there is a typo as well. Is the book about a crazy man in a fugue, the bond between a boy and his mentor, carried into adulthood? Is it about the spirituality of gardening? A romance between two neighbors? A murder mystery/stalker tale? Sure, a GOOD writer could weave this all together to make a rich, engaging, plausible story, but Harris' talents seem to run awfully thin under such demands.
Despite being bitterly, bitterly disappointed, I am giving this more than one star. There are moments, perhaps even less, when Harris' potential winks through the manure. Some turns of phrase took me by surprise, and perhaps that's why I kept plugging forward. The image of Jay's girlfriend, Kerry, when they say goodbye, is so lightly touching (although she only sees fame-by-acquaintence slipping away) that I was surprised when she disappeared until the end of the novel, to emerge as her slap-worthy, opportunistic bitchself. These are sporadic and inconsistent glimmers of talent. Like pyrite, false gold.
Rating:
Summary: A sorce of Inspiration
Review: I loved this book. Joanne Harris seemed to bring a ton of magic to a tale that by its self might have been dull and the normal. I recommend this book for anyone who loves or even just likes inspiring tales.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Surprise
Review: I purchased this book because I enjoyed Chocolat so much. At first the book was hard to get into, each chapter jumps from present day to 20 years into the past and than back again. The main character was hard for me to like at first. But after the first few chapters that drag, the main character moves from London to a small village in France and the story takes off from there. It was very enjoyable good-good story and like most stories, ended all too soon.
Rating: 
Summary: A pure torture!
Review: I was introduced to this novel by a book club. I found reading this book a pure and utter torture. The main character, Jay, is in the middle of a mid-life crisis and his childhood "mentor" Jackapple Joe visits him throughout this novel (via astral travel and flashbacks). Let's just say if I'd have know the sujbect of this novel prior to reading it-I would have skipped it. I enjoyed the movie adaptation of Harris' prior novel Chocolat (even with it's mysticism) but this novel was a huge disappointment and agonizing experience.
Rating:
Summary: A pure torture!
Review: I was introduced to this novel by a book club. I found reading this book a pure and utter torture. The main character, Jay, is in the middle of a mid-life crisis and his childhood "mentor" Jackapple Joe visits him throughout this novel (via astral travel and flashbacks). Let's just say if I'd have know the sujbect of this novel prior to reading it-I would have skipped it. I enjoyed the movie adaptation of Harris' prior novel Chocolat (even with it's mysticism) but this novel was a huge disappointment and agonizing experience.
Rating:
Summary: A Real Fizzle!
Review: I've read two other Joanne Harris books--Chocolat and Five Quarters of an Orange--and by far, this novel is way below those two. I was so disappointed to find that this one was so badly written, hard for me to swallow. So I read it just to be finishing it--speedy reading as there weren't many details of village life and the characters, which I'd have liked. It seemed like Harris perhaps might have been under pressure to turn out another book right after the highly successful Chocolat, and did it way too hurriedly and without much of a story or a plausible one (the novel has more than a few flaws and mistakes in it; it really bothered me, for instance, that Jay just takes off for England near the end, when he's supposed to be taking care of Rosa, his neighbor's child).Yes, characters from Chocolat reappear in this book, but mostly only as names. You don't feel like you know the villagers the way you did in Chocolat, and I also found the main character, Jay, pretty flat, a sort of cardboard character, his British girlfriend Kerry embarrassingly shallow, and his childhood mentor, Joe, a character of endless repetitive words/sentences. Well, the whole novel read more like an outline, needed sketching in--it's something you can read very quickly and you won't be missing much, too bad. For way too much of the novel, it alternates between Jay's childhood summer and the present, which isn't a bad thing ordinarily; however, the problem here was that it was done in very small snatches--a page or two on '75 and then another page or two on '99 and so on, back and forth. This is just way too short and abrupt a time change--you never have a chance to get really involved before you're in another time period. Anyway, if you care about good writing, give this one a miss (actually I'd only recommend Chocolat of Harris' books, which isn't a great literary book, but which has real charm.)
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