Five Quarters of the Orange

Rating:
Summary: A Childhood Completely Unlike Most of Ours
Review: The story follows a little girl and her family's life in a town during occupation during the war. She manages to get involved in the sordid blackmarket running going on in the town, with her brother and sister getting presents and attention from ratting on their nieighbours, in a way they convince themselves is harmless. Her adventures as a girl are told as a memory, when she returns to the town under a different name as a middle age woman. She sees all sorts of battles, as a girl and a woman, but will warm your heart, the way she has survived, and managed to return. A fiesty, courageous read. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: Deadly recipes
Review: Despite the fact that this is a beautifully written novel, I cannot say that I "enjoyed" it. I've come to the conclusion that there isn't a single joyous moment in the whole book and while appreciating the fact that it's set in wartime occupied France, and perhaps there wasn't much to be joyous about, one SHOULD feel an empathy with at least some of the characters. Framboise Dartigen is an old woman, reliving her life story, mainly her childhood, growing up in German occupied France during WW2 and and recalling the strange existence ahe and her siblings had with their hard and bitter mother, a woman driven crazy by migraines which are relieved only by illicitly obtained drugs. In later life, Framboise is being blackmailed into releasing her secret recipes, by an unsrupulous nephew and his wife who threaten to reveal dark secrets about the familys' connections with the enemy during the war.I found it to be an unhappy book which left me with unhappy feelings when I'd finished it.

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary Tale Of Children Growing Up in Occupied France
Review: World War II is waging, France has been occupied by the Nazis, and life on a simple French farm is about to become a terrifying nightmare.

Mirabelle Dartigen is a war widow with three children. The youngest, Framboise, narrates the tale of her dysfunctinal mother and hints of a tragedy that drove the family from their home and brought the scorn of the entire village upon them. The story is brilliantly plotted and even though I could not sympathize with the narrator, I was hooked on finding out the details of the tragedy which is given to us in bits and pieces through flashbacks.

Framboise at nine is a spunky kid, full of grit and determination, but also extremely cold-hearted. She is the young version of her dysfunctinal mother, a woman who does not show love, scolds constantly, and takes to her bed with horrid migraines for days on end. Framboise learns how to initiate her mother's illness and is diabolical in plotting and carrying out her plans to make her mother sick and bed-ridden. Meanwhile, she and her brother and sister are free to roam, meet up with Nazi soldiers and exchange gossip about their neighbors for chocolate, magazines, and other treats. At what point the children realize they are collaborating with the enemy and sending their neighbors to death camps is not clear, but by the time they realize fully what they are doing they are so enchanted by one particular German solider that they do not care and can easily justify their actions to themselves.

While we all know war is hell for those fighting at the front, this book examines the personal hell of civilians who become entangled with the enemy. A brutal rape, a senseless drowning, and a terrifying witch-hunt all explode on the pages of this novel and leave the reader pondering what the French people must have felt during WWII. To be part of the Resistance or to collaborate with the enemy is certainly a key factor in this novel.

I thought the ending left several unanswered questions and an epilogue would definitely have been in order. However, if you enjoy books where an old woman looks back on her childhood and tries to remember and set the record straight, you will enjoy this one.

Rating:
Summary: A bitter pill, beautifully written.
Review: There are more than a few chilling features to this quick read. Harris does a superb job of creating the world of a backwater, literally, town and the isolated life of a French farm family with her rich description. Perhaps, that makes the consciencelessness (!) of the narrator's actions and reminisences all the more painful to read. I saw the two surprise elements of the ending coming about half way through. I confess I don't tend to care for first person narratives because if you don't care about the person doing the talking, what's the point? However, there is enough skill in the prose and if not redemption in the "heroine" then dare I say healing to make it worth one's time.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: What words can be used to describe Five Quarters of the Orange? Beautiful, provincial, tumultuous. Laced with the bits and pieces of recipes that we have all come to love from Joanne Harris, this book is like comfort food served warm with a good glass of wine. A story about family ties and history all based around the favorite daughter (though she didn't know it then) this book will make you want to call your mother just to talk. I highly recommend this book to anyone, of any age.

Rating:
Summary: I Still Love Oranges, Maybe Not In So Many Ways
Review: I love taking a trip to France with Joanne Harris, but this novel fell short of what Harris is normally capable of.

The main character is a much used Harris character, a crotchety old lady who runs a café in a quaint little French town. Her life is a bit of a mystery but explained with flashbacks to her tragic childhood urged on by messages her mother leaves her in an old scrawled cookbook. Eventually the anger of the old woman makes sense but I was left hoping for more. Harris writes with such explanatory sensitivity to the senses that her books are normally explorations into another world. I enjoyed this novel but I didn't find it as appealing as many of her others.

Harris makes a mystery out of this novel, leading the readers down paths that would have been more effective had they been written with her more unique and magical hand. Instead we are immersed in the beauty of French cooking, the countryside and in the quaintness of little villages only to be sabotaged by the harshness of corrupt Germans and a touch of the war resistance. I wish the story had been told with less effort and more lyrical meaning, as Harris is quite capable of weaving together great fairy tales of hope. I loved certain aspects of this novel but yawned through other parts. The smell of oranges will pervade your senses as you read, don't forget what Harris brings to the table despite the five quarters of this story.


Rating:
Summary: Dark but very compelling
Review: Mirabelle Dartigen is a brilliant cook whose legacy to her daughter Framboise is her talent and a notebook containing her recipes. She is also a widow who is plagued by blinding migraine headaches, and addicted to the morphine she needs to survive them. These debilitating, crippling headaches are always preceded by the smell of oranges, so she will not permit an orange in her house.

Tormented by pain, drug addiction and mental illness, Mirabelle attempts to raise three children alone in German-occupied France after her husband is killed by the Germans. She is not up to the task, physically or mentally, and the children are left to raise themselves.

Framboise, wild to begin with, has hardened toward her mother, whose afflictions have made her distant, mean and unapproachable. In order to ensure that her mother doesn't interfere with her plans, which alternately involve telling the town's secrets to a charismatic German who brings her and her siblings presents, and trying to catch a giant pike thought to grant any wish to whomever catches it (and to bring tragedy upon anyone who sees it without catching it), Framboise steals an orange and places it in her mother's pillow in order to trigger one of her migraines.

Throughout the book, she uses oranges to control her mother, who reacts to the odor by shutting herself into her room for days in screaming, sleepless pain, while the children fend for themselves, and do as they wish.

Years later, the elderly Framboise, looking back and reading through her mother's diary-like notebook, gains some insight into the woman's agony and her own part in it. She has returned to her home after decades, hiding her identity from her town, which remembers her family as conspirators with the Nazis, and responsible for the murder of a German and the execution of several townsfolk. She lives among them because it is her home, but is terrified that she will be found out and recognized as

Rating:
Summary: STELLAR BOOK, MEDIOCRE READING
Review: How disappointing to listen to a voice performance that doesn't capture the essence of the main character. What follows is my impression of the hardcover book, but the audio left me uninterested.

Suggestion? Read rather than listen.

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.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book for all 5 senses!
Review: This is the first book I've read by Joanne Harris, and it won't be my last! Harris writes with such poetry that involves you fully in the story, you can't put the book down. You're IN the story, it's so vivid, you can see the town market, taste the oranges, smell the fresh air, hear the laughter and touch the river...

The story is about a family that was torn apart by the war and it's cruel ways. A mother and her three children are struggling to get by; in a constant battle for control, freedom and happiness. Deeply embedded in the story is a secret, one so volitle, it's been hidden for 50 years. But now it's time to confront the past. It starts with the main character, Boise, going home, only due to her past, no one knows who she really is.

I really enjoyed this story. It's not a long book, but as you reach the end, you'll be wishing it were a bit longer. And I have to say, being a very avid reader, Joanne Harris is quite a unique writer!