A Book for all Senses

Dark and rich, Five Quarters of an Orange by Joanne Harris will engage all of your senses. A tragedy that took place during the German Occupation when Framboise was a child haunted her throughout her life and kept the past in the shadows of her mind.  Now she is 65 and returns to that small town in France, as a widow with the intention of buying back her mother's farm and hopefully making peace with the past.  As her inheritance, Framboise received a scrapbook of recipes from her mother.  It's a remarkable book, a combination of original recipes interlaced with raw, overwhelming emotion offering great insights into her mother's psyche.
Ex: Below a recipe for mulled cider she writes:
      "I can remember what it was like. To be in the light, to be whole...Theres no sweetness in suffering, whatever people might think. It eats away everything in the end."
This is a book about relationships and the conflicts that arise especially between a mother and her daughter.  The sense that you can never protect your children completely is an underlying emotion revealed throughout the recipe scrapbook and that fact can leave you frozen at times.