Five Quarters of the Orange

Review by Rhonda

It’s been a few months since I read Five Quarters of the Orange, but author Joanne Harris’s flair for description still stands out in my mind. She does not stop at letting readers see and hear the story; she lets us smell and taste it as well. I suppose that’s not surprising when one takes into consideration that Harris also wrote Chocolat, which gained fame a year after its 1999 publication when Johnny Depp starred in the motion picture. One of the most impressive things about Harris’s writing is her ability to include descriptive passages without allowing them to confuse or slow the plot.

Interweaving the past and present, Harris presents readers with the life story of Framboise Simon, a French girl forced into exile after her family was blamed for a tragedy during the town’s German occupation. As an adult, Framboise decides to move back to the small village, hoping that no one will recognize her. Her return is successful at first, helped by the opening of her bakery. She uses the same recipes that her mother used years ago, and still (somewhat unbelievably) no one seems to make the connection.

As Framboise lays the foundation for a new life, she is drawn back into the past by a recipe album she recently inherited when her mother died. She reads her mother’s writings, sometimes little more than incoherent notes, and forgotten memories begin to resurface, causing Framboise to jeopardize her present life and to look at her past in a different light. The novel does an outstanding job of illustrating how our view of childhood events can change when we remember those events as adults.