Five Quarters of the Orange

This was a used book that I recently got at Hastings.  My reasons for picking up particular books are pretty silly.  But, I picked up this one because it was by the same author as Chocolat.  I never read that book but I loved the movie.  And, I love books about food.  Such as Like Water For Chocolate.


Fiver Quarters of the Orange follows an older woman as she returns to the small village where she grew up but fled due to a scandal during World War II.  The book goes back and forth between the present and the summer during WWII where her life was forever changed.

Her father was killed in the war.  She and her sister and brother were then raised by her mother.  The mother was afflicted with terrible migraines and when one would come on she would smell oranges.  Then she would lock herself in her room, leaving her kids to their own devices.  Framboise, the main character and youngest child, figures out that if she uses orange peels and a bit of orange juice, she can get her mother to retire to her room for a day.  Then she and her siblings are free to do whatever they like.

The kids get into all sorts of trouble as they are "spies" for German soldiers in a nearby town.  They trade "information" for comic books, candy, and lipstick.  It all goes horribly awry causing the family to flee and Framboise to return decades later pretending she has never been there.

From her mother she inherits a cookbook of sorts.  It is filled with recipes and cryptic diary entries.  The diary entries have no discernible pattern.  They aren't by date.  Often don't include names.  And are obviously written by a troubled person.  Framboise spends her time cooking her mother's recipes and trying to decode the cryptic entries to unravel all that happened to the family so long ago.