A review by thrushnightingale
Chocolat by Joanne Harris

3.0

Chocolat is the story of Vianne Rocher, a young woman who moves into a small village between Toulouse and Bordeaux with her daughter and starts an artisan chocolate store. She brings light and forgotten pleasures to the local people, though some are wary of her, particularly the priest, who eventually grows obsessed with her and the chocolate store, who likens her newness, her strangeness, to a threat; her dark eyes and flared skirt and nimble speech. For it is also about prejudice: against the Roma people; against strangeness and difference, and how fear for these elements can carry into violence, and how village gossip can expand into attempts of exiling the subject. It is about being haunted by the past. Vianne's mother returns to her in dreams and thoughts; her childhood where she was endlessly twirling between towns, countries, bird-like, with her vivacious, restless, colorful, and at last dying mother.

I enjoyed how descriptive this book was. The art of making chocolate; transforming bricks of couverture chocolate into something more delicate and artful, a kind of magic, alchemy. There is magic in the book, literal and metaphorical. It is a warmly colored, poetic, sensual book. One can almost smell the spices. 

3.5/5