It’s over seven years since I first came across Joanne Harris. I read her debut novel ‘Chocolat’, set in a small French town called Lansquenet, after reading several enthusiastic reviews. I liked it, on the whole, and often wondered vaguely what happened to Vianne, the chocolate-making and rather mystical heroine, not to mention the people whose lives she affected so deeply.
A couple of years later I read ‘The Lollipop Shoes’ which purported to be a sequel, but really stood alone. It was set in Paris and rather different in style. I liked it, too, but somehow it did not feel as if it involved the same people.
So I was very pleased to read ‘Peaches for Monsier Le Curé’, whch turns out to be a true sequel to 'Chocolat'. Vianne receives an unexpected letter, and decides that she might as well make a visit to Lansquenet with her teenage daughter Anouk and her six-year-old Rosette. They stay in an empty house which belonged to an old friend, and gradually find themselves deeply involved in the lives of people in the town.
Things have moved on in the eight years since Vianne left. There’s quite a community of Muslims, who are involved in various feuds. A young man, who married one of the girls, is trying to insist that they should all wear the traditional veils... yet he seems quite progressive in other ways. And then there’s the woman in black, Ines, who was running a school for Muslim girls until it was burned down...
While the story is mainly written from Vianne’s perspective, there are some sections written from the point of view of Father Reynaud, her old adversary, who has been accused of arson. Both viewpoints are in the first person, and this confused me slightly at first. However, it works well, and is a clever way of giving insight into their minds, along with the growing realisation that they are not so different from each other after all.
The book is full of mysteries and questions which are gradually answered, along with some quite suspenseful plot lines which made it difficult for me to put the book down at times. As with ‘Chocolat’, there’s a mystical element running through the story but I didn't find it disturbing. Whereas some of Joanne Harris’s books have been really too dark for my taste, this one felt much lighter. There's some intriguing and sensitive commentary about both religious and cultural differences between different groups.
It’s quite a long book, over 500 pages and took me a while to get into, but the writing is excellent and I liked it very much. I would recommend reading this as a sequel to ‘Chocolat’; although it stands alone, there are references to prior events, some of which would be harder to understand without having read the first book. However, I don’t think its at all necessary to have read ‘The Lollipop Shoes’.
Recommended.
Note that this appears to have been re-named 'Peaches for Father Francis' in some American editions. This book is available on Kindle as well as in paperback.
You can also read my longer review of 'Peaches for M le Curé' at the Bookbag site.
I've been reading Joanne Harris's books for a few years, now. I very much enjoyed her three food-related novels, set mainly in villages in France. I've been slightly concerned at the increasingly occult feel to some of her more recent books, but she is such a good writer that I've continued reading, and was pleased to be given this one as a present recently.
'The lollipop ahoes' is actually a sequel to Harris's first and best-known novel 'Chocolat'. Vianne Rocher, who is now known as Yanne Charbonneau, owns a small chocolaterie in a suburb of Paris. However, it's rather run-down, and not very successful. Her daughter Anouk - now known as Annie - is eleven, and she has another daughter, three-year-old Rosette. Rosette does not speak at all, although she communicates well in sign language.
Into their lives breezes Zozie, an outgoing and vibrant young woman, who is very taken with Anouk. However, the reader already knows from the prologue that Zozie is not who she says she is; she is a collector of identities. She goes cold-bloodedly through life collecting information about people who have died, taking on both their characters and their bank accounts for a while, before moving on. She is clearly a dangerous person, although this is not at all obvious to those who meet her. Zozie is, above all things, an excellent actress.
The story is told from three first-person perspectives: Zozie, Vianne and Anouk, in different sections. It works extremely well, seeing events from their very different viewpoints.
This novel has much more of a strongly occult thread than the previous novels, although not quite sufficient to make me stop reading. Vianne and Anouk have given up their incantations and tarot readings, although they remain afraid of unknown forces who may catch up with them, and of invoking wrath and negative karma.
However, Zozie, similarly gifted, has no such qualms. She determines, moreover, to draw Anouk into her web, starting by encouraging her to take revenge on some unpleasant classmates in her school, and then building voodoo dolls to change her environment.
As the book progresses, it becomes a clear battle of good against evil, increasingly dark in places. Anouk is torn between her mother and Zozie; at the same time Vianne is torn between the wealthy but dull man - her landlord - who wants to marry her, and Roux, whom she once loved with passion.
'The Lollipop Shoes' is full of symbolism and stories, and very well written. I was pleased that the ending was more reassuring than it could have been, with a good low-key message about the importance of standing up to bullies, making the most of oneself, and also avoiding any occultic influences.
All in all, I enjoyed it.
NB - this book is known as 'The Girl with No Shadow' in the USA.
Review copyright Sue's Book Reviews, 13th July 2007
I've enjoyed Joanne Harris's 'food' related novels, of which 'Chocolat' is probably the best-known of them. While I'm slightly uncomfortable with some of the low-key occult flavour that creeps into some of them, I find her writing and characterisation strong enough that I'm always keen to read more of her books - at least, so far.
'Gentlemen and players' is very different from everything else I've read by this author. It opens with the rather shocking statement:
"If there's one thing I've learned in the past fifteen years, it's this: that murder is really no big deal."
The narrator at this stage is an adult, looking back on childhood years fifteen years previously when a rather run-down boys' private school, St Oswald's, was out of bounds. The narrator (whose name we do not learn until the final chapters) attended a mixed comprehensive instead, and came from a broken home.
There's another narrator, too - Roy Straitley, the Latin teacher at this private school, who has been teaching for thirty-three years, and is looking forward to his 'century' - the hundredth term. He might retire some time soon; indeed, some members of staff feel he should already have retired. They feel that classics study is unnecessary, and that Mr Straitley is getting too old to continue. Not that he has any problem with discipline - he's evidently an excellent teacher who has good rapport with his students - but he is slowing down a little, and feeling a few twinges in the region of his heart.
The two narrators alternate, gradually building up the story of both present and past. Clearly there was some scandal back fifteen years previously; something so shocking that the first narrator has managed to return to the school as a teacher, with false references, in the hope of taking some kind of revenge. And as the first sentence hints, it's going to be fairly drastic.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel. It's very much character-driven, but the genre is a sort of public school thriller. It's very well-written, introducing minor characters gradually and making most of them memorable; the differing viewpoints, while similar in style, also show very different views of school life and the staff and pupils in general.
There's some tension, inevitably, but not so much as to give me nightmares; instead it made this quite a page-turner, a book I could hardly put down by the time I was half-way through. There are some dramatic revelations in the final chapters, one of which I was expecting, but not all of them. The ending itself was open but satisfying.
All in all, I very much enjoyed 'Gentlemen and players'. Recommended. Published in 2005; available in Kindle form as well as paperback. Often found second-hand.
Review copyright © Sue's Book Reviews, 11th June 2008
I've read Joanne Harris's three food-related books (of which Chocolat was the first and best-known) so was interested to try 'Coastliners', a novel about people living on a small island off the coast of France, which was a slightly different venture.
The opening is a bit dull - I skimmed the prologue, which described the island of Le Devin, featured in the book, and the two main parts of it - Les Salants and La Houssinière. There was a sketch-map at the beginning, which I did refer to more than once while reading the book, but I found the prologue was just ' factual' information that didn't add to the story at all.
The main part of the book features Mado, a young woman who lived on the island until her mother left her father some years previously. Her mother has recently died, so Mado returns to see her father, unsure what reception she will get. He's an austere kind of person who barely says a word, and she's not even sure if he loves her.
But although Mado doesn't expect to stay for long, she finds herself quickly caught up in island life, and particularly the general despondency she finds amongst 'her' people, the ones in Les Salants. They see the Houssinières as enemies, always getting the tourists, trying to take over the entire island. Mado tries to push her friends into fighting back, but they don't want to... until an apparent miracle happens, and things start to change rapidly.
Joanne Harris's writing is fluid and evocative, and her people seem real - despite there being such a large number that I frequently lost track of who was who. She portrays clearly the struggle between island customs and traditions, and the pull of modern life.
People on Le Devin don't seem to be living in the 21st century - they're barely in the 20th, with few cars, no computers, few modern conveniences. They don't even keep up-to-date with world news. But some things never change in human nature, and the idea of attracting lots of tourists brings out greed in even the nicest of people.
There are broken and healed relationships, uncovered mysteries from the past, a strange but helpful young man whose background is a puzzle to everyone, and some drama towards the end that leads to twists and turns in the plot that left me turning the pages compulsively, wondering how it would all end. I was afraid the ending had been left completely open when I got there - until I discovered a short epilogue, which cleared up my questions.
Recommended.
'
Five Quarters of the Orange' is the third novel I've read by Joanne Harris. Like the others, it's set in rural France and there's a lot of cooking in it. Unlike the others, it's a complex and sometimes dark story with frequent flashbacks to World War II when France was occupied by the Nazis.
The main character, Framboise, is in her sixties as the book starts. She tells us that she's settled into her old family house, but under her married name, without any of the neighbours knowing who her family was, because of some terrible event in the past that made her an outcast. As the book gradually unfolds, with scenes from present intertwined with the past, we learn what the secret is, and how she eventually deals with it.
It took a while to get going, but by the time I was half-way through I was very involved in both the plot and the people. It was cleverly written, with information revealed a little like that of a mystery story, and the eventual climax working well.
Thought-provoking in places, a book I will probably think about from time to time for a few weeks.
Recommended.
'Blackberry Wine' is the second novel I've read by Joanne Harris in recent months. The plot revolves around Jay, a rather disillusioned writer who completed one brilliant book, years previously, and a great deal of junk fiction.
Jay is married to the ultra-smart and supercilious Kerry. One day, on impulse, he decides to buy an old farm in France - and then moves there, out of the blue. Most of the novel revolves around his re-finding his writing muse, getting the farm into some kind of shape, and getting to know the neighbours.
But that's only the current (1999) side of the book. Interwoven between the modern plot are Jay's memories of 1975, when he was a rather fed-up teenager who befriended an elderly eccentric called Joe. Joe taught Jay all he knows about plants and herbs, and also preserving and wine-making.
Wine is an important motif in the book - so much so that its narrator (in places) is a bottle of wine. Surprisingly this works well; the narrator is not intrusive, and most of the book is told from the third-person viewpoint of Jay.
There's magic too, in a low-key earthy sort of way. Talismans against bullies, incantations against attack, even some sequences (perhaps) of astral travel. But they all happen in such matter-of-fact surroundings that they don't jar with the rest of the plot at all. Jay begins to come to terms with his past as he relaxes in his new surroundings and learns the truth about some of his neighbours.
All in all, I thought this a pleasant book,. It's ideal to read when there's a lot going on, since it was quite possible to read a couple of short chapters at night, and not feel the need to keep going until the early hours. I didn't find myself as engrossed as I was by the same author's 'Chocolat', but that's just as well in a busy time of year. Even so, I was surprised to find that it's taken me three weeks to finish a book of only 330 pages.
It's taken me a few years to get around to reading the novel 'Chocolat' by Joanne Harris. I had read quite a few reviews, all of them enthusiastic, calling the book a modern fairy-tale, or a delightful romp, or even suggesting it was one of the best books ever written. But somehow, despite the alluring title, I wasn't keen enough to buy it new, so had to wait until I found it in a charity shop.
It's not a long novel (just over 300 pages in paperback) but it's taken me about a week to read it. That's a good thing, in that I haven't found it gripping or un-put-down-able, but it means I don't class it as one of the best books ever. It was pleasant, well-written, and a bit different to most modern books - but having finished it, I'm not sure entirely why the world raved over it.
The story is about Vianne Rocher, a single mother with a six-year-old daughter. They have been travelling, but decide to settle down in a small town in France. Vianne opens a chocolate shop, and gradually makes friends - and also enemies. She particularly arouses the ire of the local priest, a parsimonious and rather unpleasant man. In many ways she's the catalyst for changes in this ultra-traditional town: she asks questions, challenges people's ideas, and generally tries to make life pleasant for them.
There's a strange sort of mystical element running through the book; initially I wondered if there was going to be some unexpected secret (was Vianne a witch? An angel? An extra-terrestrial?) but as the book continued, I realised that it was just that her personality and life experience were in contrast to those of the people around her.
Still, she perceives more than is there - spotting people's deep problems, seeing their thoughts - and although this is explained partly in terms of reading tarot cards and scrying in chocolate, I wanted there to be something more, yet that thread almost faded away.
So, all in all, an interesting book; worth reading, yet not gripping. The ending was dramatic in various ways, and mostly satisfactory, although it left the future somewhat open. I'll probably try reading more by this author, and may even re-read this book again one day.
