Sam Reviews: "Five Quarters of the Orange" by Joanne Harris

I didn't really know what this book was about, and I felt like it had a slow start, but once it got some traction...whew.  I was hard pressed to put it down.  The writing feels scattered at times, but by the end it makes sense as to why and I appreciate it so much.  There were so many things I didn't anticipate, turns I wasn't expecting, and that ending. Highly recommend this story for anyone who appreciate memiors.

"It is a whimsical touch, which surpasses and troubles me.   That this stony and prosaic woman should in her moments harbor such thoughts. For she was sealed off from us - from everyone - with such fierceness that I had thought her incapable of yielding."

"And she baited me.  Deliberately - or so I thought. Now I think that maybe she couldn't help it, that it was as much in her unhappy nature to bait me as it was in mine to defy her."

"To her, those petty rules mattered because those were the things she used to control our world. Take them away and she was like the rest of us, orphaned and lost."

"'The headache must come soon' she thought. Somehow the anticipation of pain can be even more troubling, more of a misery than the pain itself.   The anxiety that was a permanent crease in her forehead nibbled at her mind like a rat in a box, killing sleep."

"Like the clock, I am divided. At three in the morning, anything is possible."

"She was rock salt and river mud, her rages as quick and furious and inevitable as summer lightening. I never sought the cause, merely avoiding the effect as best I could."

"It was the wrong thing to say. Sometimes everything you say is the wrong thing."

"I was in a landslide where every movement starts a new rock fall, bringing a new collapse of the world I thought steady."

"And in that moment I loved him completely and with a suddenness which startled away my rage."

"That's the trouble with heroes, they never quite live up to expectations, do they?"

"I never asked myself whether I loved him. It was irrelevant to the moment. Impossible to equate what I felt, that aching, desperate joy. And yet that was what it was. My own confusion, my loneliness, the strangeness with my mother, the separation from my sister and brother, had formed a kind of hunger, a mouth opening instinctively to any scrap of kindness."

"It wasn't enough. I'd had my day, my one perfect day, and already my heart was boiling with rage and dissatisfaction."

"A child is not a fruit tree. She understood that too late. There is no recipe to take a child into sweet, safe adulthood. She should have known that."