Five Quarters Of The Orange (Paragon Softcover Large Print Books)

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With two alternating timelines throughout the story, Five Quarters of the Orange may be described as historical fiction. One is during Framboise Dartigen's childhood during the German Occupation. Framboise remembers her difficult relationship with her mother and two siblings as well as her dangerous friendship with a young German officer. The other is present-day France, now following the life of the widowed Framboise Simon, having returned to the village of her childhood from which her family was expelled during the Second World War. Framboise opens a small restaurant, cooking the recipes left to her by her mother, whilst concealing her identity, lest she be recognized as the daughter of the woman who once brought shame and tragedy upon the village.

I was nine years old in 1942. Father had died in the war and Maman was unpredictable. "I can smell oranges," she would say and rage furiously as she disappeared to her room with a migraine. Cassis, Reine and I would then go to Angers, where we exchanged information with the Germans for sweets.Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity" (pg 4). Framboise said this about her mother's relationship with food. Discuss the many different roles food plays in Framboise's life.

Harris has a gift for injecting magic into the everyday ... She is an old-fashioned writer in the finest sense, believing in a strong narrative, fully rounded characters, a complex plot, even a moral Daily Telegraph In a strange contradiction of her own nature, the mother is also a superb cook: the delicious meals she prepares would make a voluptuary blush -- an irony, and an enigma. How does one gather such fruits, (quite literally) when the rest of Europe is starving? This rang something of a false note -- but perhaps the juxtaposition suggests that out of rotten fruit can spring the most wondrous delicacies? Still ... Joanne Harris is an Anglo-French author, whose books include fourteen novels, two cookbooks and many short stories. Her work is extremely diverse, covering aspects of magic realism, suspense, historical fiction, mythology and fantasy. She has also written a DR WHO novella for the BBC, has scripted guest episodes for the game ZOMBIES, RUN!, and is currently engaged in a number of musical theatre projects as well as developing an original drama for television. Framboise, Cassis and Reine's mother. A complicated woman, more at home in the garden or the kitchen than the nursery. She has had to be strong to survive, but her children do not understand how much she genuinely cares for them. She believes in treating children like fruit trees - they benefit from harsh pruning - and so gives them no sign of affection. Instead she expresses her love through cooking - although the children do not understand this. Mirabelle is generally not liked in the village, partly because she does not attend church and partly because for a woman running a farm alone was thought at that time to be slightly indecent. She suffers from terrible headaches, often heralded by the phantom scent of oranges, which cause her to be out of action for days at a time. She keeps a diary among her recipes, written in a secret code.Framboise falls the most for Liebwitz. By, in fact, actually falling in love with him. Which leads to the event that has remained hidden for years, decades, in the family. The event that changed each of their lives forever. When he tells young Framboise that he can no longer see her, likely ever again, she cries, imploring that this not be so. When he refuses her pleas, she desperately convinces him to swim out to a dangerous area of the lake, simply to spend more time with him. He is caught in a root underwater and drowns. The three of them, Cassis, Reinette, and Framboise, surreptitiously make the body disappear, and never discuss the incident again. Their mother, despite showing no real love for them their entire lives, covers up for them when she finds out. They never know until present day that she even knew. The novels of Joanne Harris are a literary feast for the senses. Five Quarters of the Orange represents Harris's most complex and sophisticated work yet -- a novel in which darkness and fierce joy come together to create an unforgettable story. Five Quarters is also a story about childhood. As an ex-teacher and mother of a young child I find it easier perhaps to visualize the darker side of childhood, the occasional strangeness which exists in even the most well-behaved and affectionate of our children. Children are far more complex creatures than the Victorian ideal would have us believe; and the children of Five Quarters are neither well-behaved nor affectionate, but have evolved a system of behaviour which has little to do with that of the adults around them, with survival their main priority, and power their only currency. Framboise especially has had to grow up fast. Having lost her father at such an early age that little remains of him in her memory, believing herself unloved by her undemonstrative mother, in constant conflict with her siblings, she has developed a greater cynicism than her years would suggest, and a more certain understanding of the weaknesses of others. Her cruelty against her mother is terribly refined and entirely conscious, and yet on other levels Framboise is very naïve and vulnerable, wanting to love and be loved. It is this vulnerability which inevitably draws her to Tomas leibnitz. He becomes a focus for Framboise’s emergent – and hitherto unconscious – sexuality as well as a fantasy father-figure for all three children. More importantly, perhaps, he plays the role of intermediary between the adult world and that of the children; joining in their games, vindicating their actions and putting the seal of authority on their betrayals. Tomas culls information out of Dartigen and her siblings on the whereabouts and activities of their neighbors and friends. Because Dartigen is the youngest, she is particularly vulnerable to Tomas’s charm. The information that she provides ironically sets up the conditions for Tomas’s murder at the hands of villagers. The Gestapo retaliates by indiscriminately killing ten residents of Les Laveuses. Fearing for her life, Mirabelle flees the family farm. Dartigen grows despondent, and never really recovers from the trauma. Even in the present day, she blames herself for starting the chain reaction of violence.

Are you planning to read this book as part of a readers’ discussion group? Here are a few resources and some questions for discussion to help yoiu get started. (Note that questions do contain spoilers, so please read the book first if you want to avoid them!) Harris indulges her love of rich and mouthwatering descriptive passages, appealing to the senses... Thoroughly enjoyable' -- ObserverHarris writes at length. The story has (just) enough action to avoid tedium and induce some sort of tension, but the pace is jog rather than sprint and the relief at getting to the end is that of arrival, not understanding. The apparent charm of the author - Chocolat was a runaway success - seems to lie in her evocation of a French never-never land where things may occasionally turn nasty, but saccharine always flows. All these events lead to the entire city shunning the family, and following one situation too many, they flee in separate directions, barely in time escaping death by the neighbors' wrath and need to designate a scapegoat. Of course, there is also the love aspect, a childhood friend, Paul, whom she eventually lets in. Together they learn to heal. If not forget, but to accept the past, their indivual secrets, and Framboise finally makes amends with her mother. Her big problem is her plotting. She is not especially cerebral, and developments hinge on events rather than emotions, so those events have to ring true to be believed. They don't. Take granny's recipes, for instance. We are told that the hopeless food-writer would kill for them, that they made the reputation of Framboise's cr perie, that Paris restaurant critics were bouleversés by their glory. But cuisine bourgeoise , which is what she cooked, has no secrets: everyone knows the rules for clafoutis or greengage tart. All the stupid niece-in-law had to do was go out and buy Tante Marie in the Kitchen . Joanne Harris a naturally sensuous writer, but her latest book has a dark core...Her descriptive and narrative talents are put to a profounder use...This gripping tale is bound to be made into a film. It's as vivid a journey through human cruelty and kindness as I've read this year Daily Telegraph