27. Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris
For lightweight reading, Joanne Harris is more than reliable, as long as you don’t read her novels too close together. Five Quarters is less mystical than her usual work, but still heavily themed with food and France, childhood and small communities.
Framboise tells her own story in flashbacks of growing up in the Nazi-occupied Loire Valley, interwoven with the present day, where she finds herself losing the battle to keep the skeletons of her family’s past locked in the cellar. In the end her choices are to run away, or fight back with the truth; she feels she shouldn’t have to choose.
Of course the answer to the big mystery turns out not to be particularly shocking, and the bad guys get their just desserts. Sorry about the spoiler; you weren’t going to read it, were you?
4/5