With her novel, Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris once again created a heroine who seduces her readers with a compelling story. And, once again, Harris’s heroine is a woman with many secrets.
Framboise Simon returns to the small French village of her birth to buy back her mother’s hosue and farm. But the locals do not recognize her – nor does she want them to: the villagers blame Framboise’s mother for a tragedy that occurred during the German occupation near the end of World War II.
Five Quarters of the Orange is a heart-breaking story of the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship. Harris is much better at developing her female characters than the males – Framboise’s brother, Cassis, is little more than a convenient plot advancement device. Only Thomas – the German soldier who “befriends” Framboise, Cassis, and their sister Reine – is given a bit of complexity.
While the “tragedy” is kept shrouded by Harris until the very end of the novel, the unveiling of it is almost anti-climactic on an emotional level, compared to some of the more pivotal events that precede it.
Although some of the twists and turns the story takes feel almost inevitable and unsurprising, Harris does use an innovative way of parceling out her revelations: embedded in the recipes passed down to Framboise by her mother. A close reading of the recipe for crème de framboise liqueur is interspersed with confessional journal entries that help Framboise place the final pieces in the puzzle that was her mother’s life.
Despite its minor faults, Five Quarters of the Orange is a fascinating story that I found difficult to put down. Even when you can sense where the story is going, the delight is in seeing how Harris will get you there.
307 pgs.
