Author Study (5): Joanne Harris

Joanne Harris

Mini Biography:Joanne Harris was born in England in 1964.  Her mother was French and her father English. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge and taught for fifteen years, She has won a number of British and international awards. In 2004, Joanne was one of the judges of the Whitbread prize (categories; first novel and overall winner); and in 2005 she was a judge of the Orange prize.  She currently lives with her husband and 15-year-old daughter in England.

Appeal Elements:

Harris has a common element in many of her novels: food.  The lush descriptions of culinary delights will leave you famished.  Pair this with the magical realism found in the chocolate trilogy, and you have a bestselling novel and an Oscar nominated film.  She often has French settings in small-town historical and/or contemporary frames.  Her tone is almost always rich and dark, most definitely not "feel-good" stories despite the food.  She has great attention to language, with a more poetic writing style than most.  Pacing is usually unhurried, these books move at their own rate, but are compelling enough to drag you along.  Characters are often deeply flawed and not entirely likable, though secondary characters show extensive development.

My Selections:

 

Chocolat Illuminating Peter Mayle's South of France with a touch of Laura Esquivel's magic realism, Chocolat is a timeless novel of a straitlaced village's awakening to joy and sensuality. In tiny Lansquenet, where nothing much has changed in a hundred years, beautiful newcomer Vianne Rocher and her exquisite chocolate shop arrive and instantly begin to play havoc with Lenten vows. Each box of luscious bonbons comes with a free gift: Vianne's uncanny perception of its buyer's private discontents and a clever, caring cure for them. Is she a witch? Soon the parish no longer cares, as it abandons itself to temptation, happiness, and a dramatic face-off between Easter solemnity and the pagan gaiety of a chocolate festival. Chocolat's every page offers a description of chocolate to melt in the mouths of chocoholics, francophiles, armchair gourmets, cookbook readers, and lovers of passion everywhere. It's a must for anyone who craves an escapist read, and is a bewitching gift for any holiday
Five Quarters of the Orange

The novels of Joanne Harris are a literary feast for the senses. Five Quarters of the Orange represents Harris's most complex and sophisticated work yet - a novel in which darkness and fierce joy come together to create an unforgettable story.

When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous Mirabelle Dartigen - the woman they still hold responsible for a terrible tragedy that took place during the German occupation decades before. Althrough Framboise hopes for a new beginning. She quickly discovers that past and present are inextricably intertwined. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the scrap book of recipes she has inherited from her dead mother.

With this book, Framboise re-creates her mother's dishes, which she serves in her small creperie. And yet as she studies the scrapbook - searching for clues to unlock the contradiction between her mother's sensuous love of food and often cruel demeanor - she begins to recognize a deeper meaning behind Mirabelle's cryptic scribbles. Whithin the journal's tattered pages lies the key to what actually transpired the summer Framboise was nine years old.

Rich and dark. Five Quarters of the Orange is a novel of mothers and daughters of the past and the present, of resisting, and succumbling, and an extraordinary work by a masterful writer.

  Blackberry Wine                                                     From the author of "Chocolat" comes an intoxicating tale of love lost and found, set in a small French village. As a boy Jay spent summers in Europe hanging out with his friend Joe and his homemade wines. Now a young man, Jay returns to France to recapture some of the magic of his lost youth.
Sleep Pale Sister Harris' early novel, never before published in the United States, is a powerful, darkly Gothic evocation of Victorian artistic life. An illicit love draws a controlling artist's wife into a dangerous world of intrigue, blackmail, and revenge.