Framboise doesn't care for the movie magazines and cigarettes-she imagines that she is bonding with Tomas on a more authentic basis. They pass all the village gossip to him, in return for luxuries that he can procure for them. Framboise and her brother and sister fall under the sway of a charismatic young German officer named Tomas Leibniz. Once untangled from the bouncing around in time, the plot is rather straightforward. Parts of this work very well, parts are frustratingly underwritten. The Dartigan family are named after fruits, and there is a lot of space devoted to Framboise's mother's recipes and Framboise's cooking-food is again a major element of the book. Framboise is determined to catch that fish. Local legend says that whoever catches Old Mother will be granted one wish. There is a fairy tale element-the existence of a giant pike that lurks in the depths of the Loire. There are hints of a terrible secret from the past, and family conflict in the present day that threatens to unmask her true identity.
The narrator is Framboise Dartigan, who was a nine year old during the events of the war, and who returned as a widow to reclaim her childhood home, while hiding her identity from the villagers who are largely the same people as when she was a child. We are back in a rural French village, but in two specific time periods-the Occupation by the Germans in WWII, and the present day. As I said-a fairy tale grounded in reality.įive Quarters of an Orange revisits that format, although less successfully over all. The time period is left charmingly vague-it looked vaguely mid-20th century, but could have been set in almost any decade.Ĭhocolat dealt with women's roles in a male dominated village, issues of racism, domestic violence, and moral rigidity enforced by religious intolerance, but a happy ending was engineered by the protagonist's magical chocolate shop. Made into a movie starring the luminous Juliette Binoche and a delicious Johnny Depp, it was a delightful fairy tale that was completely grounded in the petty feuds and the judgmental religiosity of a small French town. Joanne Harris hit the jackpot with her book Chocolat, a bit of magical realism with a decidedly hedonistic bent. Let's dig into the nuances of that assessment, shall we? I would never have found this book if not for book club, and I really rather liked it.
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