[D6U]≡ Read Gratis Blackberry Wine A Novel Joanne Harris 0071001013009 Books

Blackberry Wine A Novel Joanne Harris 0071001013009 Books

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Blackberry Wine A Novel Joanne Harris 0071001013009 Books

This is a lovely story but there is one thing that I found annoying: the narrator is a bottle of wine. Even allowing for the latitude the reader is expected to give to magical realism this just didn't work for me especially since it was not necessary. The entire story would have been the same with a straightforward third person narrative. The times the wine calls attention to itself feel intrusive but the novel as a whole is charming.


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Blackberry Wine A Novel Joanne Harris 0071001013009 Books Reviews

Like all my reviews, I will not try to wow you with repeating word for word what others have said. I love her writing and I love this book especially. I was maddened with the back and forth of her story but after a while I got used to her rhythm and couldn't put it down. Mystery, romance and good story telling.
Jay Mackintosh, a novelist, has been drifting in life since his first novel, a semi-autobiographical novel about his time with Joe, a gardener with a touch of magic about him that lived near his grandparents. We see flashbacks of his life with Joe during those difficult summers as he deals with bullies, his parents' divorce, and his first hints of love. Dissatisfied with his life, Jay buys a French chateau/farmhouse after opening one of Joe's Specials ( fruit wines). He leaves his girlfriend and begins a new life in the village (first seen in her book Chocolat). We see some familiar faces, but Jay and the ghost of Joe are key to the story as is the neighbor, a widow with a young girl who has a strained relationship with her mother-in-law and the village. Jay begins writing again and starts having hopes of a new beginning. At first, I wasn't sure I would like this book, but then Joanne Harris' magic kicked in both literally and figuratively. The story takes on some unexpected turns but ends in a satisfying conclusion.
Jay Mackintosh had spent some teenage summers hanging around Joe Cox (aka, Jackapple Joe) at Pog Hill, a decaying mining town. He wrote a successful novel based on that experience, but then declined into writing potboilers under a pen name. Now he is rediscovering himself. Some bottles of Joe's homemade wine, salvaged from Pog Hill, seem to have mysterious properties, and lead Jay into the impulse buying of a French chateau in Lansquenet, where he joins into the smalltown atmosphere and begins to write a new novel.

The story alternates between memories of Pog Hill, the small town he lost (converted into upscale housing developments) and Lansquenet, the small town he has found and wants to keep. All is not as it seems in Lansquenet, especially with his neighbor, and forces are at work to make the town into another tourist destination. Jay finds himself caught up in events, and drinking Joe's wine (his "specials") seems to bring back Joe, and redirects Jay's life.

There is something about the specials, and unexpected value in Joe's seed collection. There is more than one way to revive a town that is in decline. And the blackberry wine, well, that is the last bottle, and you have to read the novel to get there.
Blackberry Wine got off to a slow start. The opening has various bottles of wine speaking to one another, not terribly believe able. But I stuck with it because I hate to leaves books unfinished, or at least not until I have read a third and then decided. And so I read on and I am glad I did. Meeting the character of Jay left me longing for places that are not so homogenized, where everyone doesn't dress alike, engage in group think, struggle to squash individuality and differences so as not to defend. Blueberry Wine left me seeking small towns, which individuality can thrive, where there is room for personal narrative.
And in the end magic does win. It is the magic that is within each of us unless we squash it, as we too often do. Light and enjoyable. A welcome respit from today's global and violent insanity.
Jay Mackintosh is a boy-man who longs for the past of his adolescence and does not appreciate the good things in his present. He once wrote a book that garnered critical success but has squandered that success, like he's squandered just about everything else in his life. Jay's main problem is that he's stuck in adolescence, with no bridge to the here and now. He has a loyal girlfriend who knows he's a putz but wants him to change to be more her style, which he shows no signs of doing, proving that sometimes it takes two to tango. Are these pathetic characters somehow more appealing to women than they are to me? Because from where I sit they're both sad specimens.

Jay tries to revive himself by buying a farmhouse in France (he lives in London when the story starts) and starting a new book there. The book goes well, but Jay's life gets worse. He begins having hallucinations about people from the past showing up in his life in the present and welcomes these delusions as relief from his unsatisfying life. By the time I'd gotten this far in the book I was seriously wondering about Jay's mental state; I'd call him deeply delusional and suffering hallucinations and deep dissociation from the present. There's a little commentary on the process of being a writer and living in an imaginary world, but Jay's condition goes well beyond that. He abandons his girlfriend in London and starts chasing after a reclusive woman in France, who he eventually beds. She's communications challenged, like most people in this book, which is supposed to heighten the suspense but only comes off as an irritation.

The end of the book is unbelievable. The recluse harbors a dark secret which comes out of nowhere and derails the entire book, and Jay takes it all in stride and decides to become an accessory after the fact to a murder. Jay's London girlfriend finds him in France and decides to help him launch his new book to be a big success, but he decides that would change the local village too much, so he destroys the only copy of his book, depriving himself of a living. This guy is a LOSER, what do these women see in him?

This book is well written and enjoyable in places, but overall I seriously disliked the main character and the direction of the plot. If I had a single complaint it's that the book is very slow for the first two thirds and then throws too many curve balls in the last forty pages. I thought Joanne Harris had a grasp on her plotting and characters, it wasn't a matter of an author going out of control, it's that I just didn't *like* the characters or the plot. Without those there isn't much left to enjoy in a book!
This is a lovely story but there is one thing that I found annoying the narrator is a bottle of wine. Even allowing for the latitude the reader is expected to give to magical realism this just didn't work for me especially since it was not necessary. The entire story would have been the same with a straightforward third person narrative. The times the wine calls attention to itself feel intrusive but the novel as a whole is charming.