Five Quarters of the Orange

What an excellent choice for a book club discussion! The quirky, odd, strange characters will keep you talking (or thinking) for hours. Narrator Flamboise alludes to a mystery at the very beginning of the book which is slowing revealed like a fisherman letting out his line. Masterfully, it will keep you reading to the last page. Beyond the compelling story itself, Harris' writing style is very evocative of the places she describes and her language has a beautiful literary quality without being unwieldy or pretentious. Most excellent!

I love this book. She has such a unique and lyrical manner of writing. Highly recommend it. Plus it's got a discussion section in this edition.

At 64 years old, Framboise returns to the French village of her birth--- a village she, her brother Cassis, sister Reine-Claude and their mother left as disgraced exiles during the German occupation of France. Enbittered by the events that took place that year she was nine years old, she hopes against hope that the village will not connect the froggy-faced little girl with the grandmotherly woman she has become. Luck is with her---she purchases the old farm where she once lived and by utilising her mother's mouth watering recipes found in an old scrapbook, she opens a marvelous creperie, popular with both the locals and vacationers alike. When her food is reviewed by a famous culinary critic, her weak nephew and his ambitious wife, also restauranteurs, slither in, questioning her owneship of her mother's scrapbook, desiring its recipes for their own failing big city endeavor. Furious, Framboise refuses, triggering an attack meant to destroy the success of her creperie and simultanoeuly reveal the secret that has shamed and haunted her for her entire life.Ingeniously woven throughout the modern story is Framboise's first person account of her ninth year. Harris' style is fast-paced; her revelations are amply yet masterly metered out to keep the reader thoroughly entranced until the last page. The book is not overly long, yet Harris manages to finely draw her characters: Mirabelle, the migraine suffering mother, Tomas,the sly Black Market manipulator, Paul, the one person in the village that recognizes Framboise, and Framboise hersef, strong and bright, ever the leader, not realizing what her cleverness will orchestrate.I found this novel much more interesting and entertaining than Harris' other popular novel Chocolat; the format seems more complete--the structure more satisfying and the ending neatly tying up all fragments and substories. Like Chocolat, it is a novel meant to be read with a fine glass of red wine and a square of good European dark chocolate. Harris' food descriptions utterly tantalize, her knowledge and love of food is evident in the way in which she allows her characters to safely emote through the food they create when they are unable to facilitate speech or gesture. After 'sampling' some of Mirabelle's culinary delights, I admit to purchasing a book on how to make homemade cordials!

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.

Harris' newest novel is darker and more complex than either Chocolat or Blackberry Wine. The story--the reminiscences of elderly, embittered Framboise Dartigan--explores the events that shaped her childhood and her village during the German occupation of France. On one level it's about the naive wartime collaboration of children and its consequences, but more importantly it's an exploration of mother-daughter relationships and how they shape the lives of multiple generations. This is a theme Harris first dipped into in Chocolat, but here the events and the emotions are sharper and more raw, and ultimately more revealing. As with her two most recent novels, food and wine are woven into the story. The discovery by Framboise of her mother's cookbook, with its secrets and emotions never revealed during her mother's life, is the vehicle that forces her to confront and to put to rest the events that have dominated her life. Harris continues to amaze, and Five Quarters is clearly her most fully realized writing. Though I found myself disliking Framboise more than a few times, the story has a depth and feeling that is hugely satisfying. Don't miss it.