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Chocolat fantasy1/31/2024 ![]() Harris also shares the gift of writers like Susan Cooper and William Horwood of being able to interweave magical description with actual magic, thus the descriptions we get of atmosphere, places, or people are always tinged with Vianne’s ability to partly see the future or read a person’s character or memories. Through Vianne’s perspective we see the small somewhat anachronistically old fashioned French village as a riot of colour and nuance, and the people who inhabit it as parts of a quirky, richly detailed tapestry. The thing that attracted me to Chocolat originally, and something which becomes instantly obvious from the first page is Harris undoubted mastery of language and poetry. Tired of the itinerant life she inherited from her mother, Vianne plans to settle in the village and setup a chocolatery, despite Lasquennet’s insular atmosphere and the stern disapproval of the village’s priest Francis Reynaud. The book begins as mystical confectioner Vianne Rocher breezes into the small French village of Lansquenet-sous-les-Tannes on Shrove Tuesday just before lent with her six year old daughter Anouk. So When my lady and I were seeking a gentle, artistic story to read together as a break from darker fantasies it seemed the right time for a serving of Chocolat. Even beside the eclectically weird selection of extracts, which ran the gamut from Philip Pullman and Eoin Colfer to Angela Carter, Chocolat stood out for its truly beautiful prose, arresting setting and colourful characters. I first encountered Joanne Harris novel in the early 2000’s, not due to the film with Judi Dench (which I still have not seen), but due to finding the first chapter in a pamphlet of extracts of fantasy novels handed out by a library service I belonged to.
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