Five Quarters of The Orange

Joanne Harris

After 50-some years, Framboise Dartigen, now in her 60's, disguises her real identity and returns to her home village in the south of France to rebuild the burntdown family farmhouse in order to live out the rest of her life there. A sour women despite her sweet name (Framboise means raspberry in French) Framboise has a secret that stems back to her childhood during WWII, living in German-occupied France with her brother, sister and mother. She and her siblings forged a friendship with a German soldier, Tomas, with whom they would trade villagers' secrets for goodies such as chocolates and comic books. A series of events ultimately lead to tragedy and in telling the story Framboise slowly reveals the follies and uncertainties the war brought to their daily lives. Framboise's mother, an emotionally stern woman who kept a diary filled with often undecipherable notes, words, recipes, and secrets and who willed this diary to Framboise upon her death, was frequently taken with debilitating migraines and often spent days at a time in bed. Just prior to the migraine coming on, her mother would think she smelled oranges in the house. The title refers to the way Framboise, at the age of six, would instigate her mother's migraines by hiding orange slices in the house which would send her mother into a debilitated state and would enable Framboise and her siblings to spend the day/night out with Tomas.

The history of this family's dynamics, especially the relationship between Framboise and her mother, is a complicated story well told. Harris uses the sensualities of food - mostly the sweetness of the fruits that the Dartigens grew on their farm - to juxtapose the emotional hardships and hostilities of love and of war and the disenchantedness and consequences that result from this environment. I would have liked to have seen Harris spend a little more time on Framboise's relationship to her own daughters in the present which is touched upon but never really explored. There is also a subplot concerning Framboise's brother and nephew (also in present day), which Harris uses as a catalyst for Framboise to tell her story but which was unnecesarily overwritten and which, for me, distracted from the richer narrative at hand. Overall, a fine book, not an uplifting one but one which does have warmth in unexpected places.