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Summary: Five Quarters of the Orange
Review: I absolutely love her stuff. It was an amazing story to me, not as easy to read as Chocolat or Blackberry Wine but still really good. I like the fact her characters are well-rounded. Everyone has faults and good things about them as well. There are things the main character does that you might no agree with but you still can relate.
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Summary: The narrator's age?
Review: One peculiar thing about this book, is the narrator clearly says that the events in her childhood happened when she was nine--her "collaboration" with a German soldier and the subsequent disaster for her family and community. Yet her behavior--her love for the soldier, her quarrels with her mother, and even the nickname the soldier uses (Backfisch is defined as "a girl in her teens" in my dictionary) is much more characteristic of a girl of 13. It makes me wonder if the author or her publisher reduced the child's age to reduce her guilt in readers' eyes. If so, it's a pity.
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Summary: Marvelous Read
Review: Joanne Harris' book, Five Quarters of the Orange is a marveous book that takes place in France. I love the way Harris blends the old world with the new. Sharing memories of childhood traditions and superstitions is something to which I can relate. Her characters are strong and authenic; easy to keep track of. I am especially fond of the main character, a woman who has survived a hard life and comes back to the village of her youth to open a cafe where she can serve the scrumptious meals that she learned from her mother. There are dark secrets hidden among the ingredients of the recipes that will keep you coming back to the chapters in this book until it finally, and rather gently, ends its enjoyable tale.Reading this book has prompted me to read the other Joanne Harris novels.
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Summary: Different and dark
Review: I liked "Chcolat" and therefore it was with anticipated pleasure that I began this book. It is quite well written, and the characters are well defined, and there is the pleasures of childhood in the French countryside all nicely laid out before us. But it isn't long before the allure of the story gives way to its much darker nature. There are the broader themes of the WW2 French resistance and German collaborators interwoven with the childhood memories, and how our heroine, now an elderly widow, strives to remain anonymous in a town that still despises her family because of its involvement in these matters so long ago. It is this darkness that makes me give this book 3 stars when I might have rated it higher. The idyllic childhood is nothing of the sort - the children are neglected by their ailing widowed mother, and they quickly become infatuated with the Germans and the thrills of being involved with them in what they think is harmless fun, but secretly know to be otherwise. Our heroine is actually quite a spiteful and manipulative little girl, and although she interseperses her memories with pity for her mother, this doesn't take the edge off that spite. And even though our heroine improves with age, the current day characters of her nephew and his wife take on that continuing unpleasant role. The novel also takes its time getting to the truth that is the core of that darkness and the reason our heroine wishes to remain anonymous. When I finally got there I was almost beyond caring about it, and I was frankly disappointed that I was able to work out what happened even before the event finally was revealed. What should have been the most suspenseful part of the book fell way short of expectations. So all in all this was a novel that had a fascinating and complex idea, dealing with issues that are still sensitive today. However, it somehow misses the mark, and whereas it was an interesting and quite well written read, it left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, and I'm not sure whether or not I enjoyed it.
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Summary: Sly and Enchanting
Review: War is hell, as we all know, but the last word on that still hasn't been said. Now Joanne Harris gives us a book that exposes the ugliness of war from the viewpoint of three neglected children, living in a German-occupied French village during World War II. In "Five Quarters of the Orange," narrator Framboise Dartigen unfolds a chilling tale in which she and her two siblings find themselves collaborating with Nazis, trading secrets about their neighbors for chocolate and comic books. The great strength of "Five Quarters of the Orange" is Harris' unflinching honesty about childhood--its capacity for treachery and cruelty. Graphic images of Framboise's war against the life of the nearby river underline this theme. After a village girl is bitten and killed by a venomous snake, Framboise nets a dozen snakes, crushes their skulls and leaves them to rot on the river banks. At the heart of the novel, as in the novelist's early work "Chocolat," is a complicated relationship between mother and daughter. Framboise's mother Mirabelle mistakenly applies the same techniques to child rearing that she applies to growing fruit trees. Prune them severely and they will flower. She discovers too late that children don't respond well to constant scolding and deprivation. Mirabelle is also plagued by olfactory hallucinations. Prior to her terrible migraines, she thinks she smells oranges. In scenes which make the book worth reading by themselves, Framboise gets revenge on her mother by planting a cut up orange near the stove so that the scent fills the house. These scenes of nine-year-old vindictiveness are where Harris reveals her true genius. "Five Quarters of the Orange" isn't just another war novel, however. It's also a mystery. Why does Framboise disguise her identity when she returns to her childhood village after an absence of 50 years? A scandal hangs over her head from that earlier time, so many decades ago. A scandal so flagrant she is sure she would never be accepted back into her community if they knew exactly who she was. This unknown scandal, which is gradually unfolded through flashbacks, provides most of the novel's suspense. To dwell only on the horrors of "Five Quarters of the Orange" would be to do the book an injustice, though. Though Harris' genius shines most truly in her portrayal of how war compromises even the innocent, this book is also rich in charm and whimsy--the same kind of graceful good humor that made the author's previous book "Chocolat" such a big hit and the subsequent movie so well reviewed. Scenes of the grotesque give way to moments of gentle slapstick. People who are tired of conventional treatments of the elderly in literature will especially enjoy the episode in which the elderly Framboise and her aging neighbor get the better of a 20-something hoodlum terrorizing Framboise's creperie. Their shared triumph sparks an autumnal romance that cannot fail to delight even the most cynical readers. Even for someone like Framboise with skeletons in her closet, it's never too late to make a clean breast of things, never too late to fall in love.
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Summary: Delicious
Review: As with "Chocolat" Ms. Harris gives us characters we can drink up. I always know when I love a book because I am sorry to have it end. A rich, satisfying story.
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Summary: incroyable!
Review: A friend just got back from Provence and in every picture I could "see" Five Quarters of the Orange. As a French major in college, I have long loved reading, listening to, tasting or seeing anything remotely French. The storyline had interesting details and I enjoyed the flashbacks to the occupation that set the groundwork for the tribulations Framboise endures in the present. It should make a great adaptation to film--I just hope when one does, that he or she follows the storyline better than the recent film adaptation of Harris's "Chocolat".
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Summary: LYRIC DESCRIPTIONS AND A MESMERIZING TALE
Review: While her debut novel, Chocolat (1999), was delicious and followed by the ripely seductive Blackberry Wine (2000), Joanne Harris's third offering, "Five Quarters Of The Orange," is bittersweet and tangy. When 65-year-old Framboise Simon returns to the small French village of her birth she is unrecognized by the townspeople who a half century earlier, during the German occupation, had branded her family as ignoble traitors. With a menu composed largely of her mother's old recipes, Framboise open a small café. These recipes have been kept in an album, the repository of many memories and thoughts. When the café becomes popular and is discovered by a food writer, Framboise's brother, Cassis, appears on the scene with his son and daughter-in-law in tow. They want the album the mother, Mirabelle, kept so they can produce a cookbook, and profit by making public secrets long hidden in the family's past. As a child Framboise had been befriended by a young Nazi, Tomas Leibniz. The confused girl had been swayed by his attention, and lavish gifts. Was it so easy to almost unknowingly become an informer? The album will eventually reveal a trove of untruths and deceptions. Ms. Harris once again dots her narrative with lyric descriptions of the French countryside as she weaves a mesmerizing tale. - Gail Cooke
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Summary: METAPHOR-RICH READ
Review: An angry person's voice is "screamy," a large pike that has superstitious qualties has a mouth that is "bristling with hooks," and the scent of an orange can drive a chronically angry, abusive woman to experience severe migranes...this is what to expect in Five Quarters of The Orange. You want to hate the cruel Framboise Dartigen for all of the vicious behavior she expresses to her mother, her sister and her brother, and later on, to her children, but you begin to understand, then pity this wise, grown-up child woman who was abused by a mother who loved her 3 children but had strange ways of showing it. I will not repeat the obvious observances of the other reviewers, rather, I encourage you to read this book only to try to get into all of the characters' heads so you can have a better understanding of how each of them were forced to behave in ways they felt necessary in order to survive the German occupation of their part of France. And you will understand why Framboise returns to the village she left many years past, in order to open up a small, simply run crepiere, where she lovingly creates dishes she learned from an inherited album-scrapbook that her mother created in her mostly migrane-addled state. Weaving the past and the present together, and using metaphor-heavy sentences, Five Quarters of the Orange is an intriguing read.
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Summary: From a Child's View
Review: Not since To Kill a Mockingbird have I read such an effective book written from a child's viewpoint. Five Quarters not only captures this age but this age in a certain time and place. You can almost smell the lavender and mint. You can almost taste the mouth-watering recipes Framboise and her mother prepare. Five Quarters actually has several viewpoints, all from the same character, Framboise. We enter her mind as a nine year old child during the war in France and as a middle-aged widow returning unknown to her birthplace. Finally we enter her mind as a sixty-four year old woman making peace with the past and falling in love. This is a prodigious feat for any author to pull off. While not having reached all these ages yet I still received a strong feeling of what it would be like at that point in life. The story itself is riveting and the book is one of the few that I have read recently in one sitting. There are villains and heroes, but neither are comic book characters. There are multiple nuances to every main character in the book so you cannot pigeonhole any one of them. The second world war and its effect on a small village in France, and specifically one family, is the main story. There is a mystery here to be unravelled slowly, and savored as the children savored the forbidden oranges of the title. While not exactly a story of the war its presence, in the form of German soldiers, is the catalyst for events that affect the village for generations. A very enjoyable and thought provoking book. I cannot wait to read Ms. Harris' other novels.
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