Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé: I really shouldn’t be reading this book yet as I’m still reading Joanne Harris’s The Lollipop Shoes, the book that precedes Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé, but I just had to see how it starts.
This is the beginning (and the whole of Chapter One):
Someone once told me that, in France alone, a quarter of a million letters are delivered every year to the dead.
What she didn’t tell me is that sometimes the dead write back.
Well, that seemed so familiar – and it is because here is the opening sentence of The Lollipop Shoes:
It is a relatively little-known fact that, over the course of a single year, about twenty million letters are delivered to the dead.
I’ve had The Lollipop Shoes for nearly five years and have only just got round to reading it. I bought it when it came out in hardback because I’d loved reading Chocolat and wanted to read more about Vianne Rocher – my post on Chocolat explains my love of this book. So far, though, it just doesn’t have the same enchantment as Chocolat and it’s giving me uneasy feelings. I don’t want to say too much just yet as I’ve only read half the book – but one of the characters is definitely not ‘nice’, she’s dangerous and devious, out to change Vianne’s world.
In fact, when I first looked at The Lollipop Shoes I found I didn’t want to read it – it’s so different in mood from Chocolat. So it went back on the shelf until this week, when I read Christine’s review of Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé and I knew it was time to read Joanne Harris’s books. It sounds as though Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé is just as enjoyable as Chocolat and maybe not quite so dark as The Lollipop Shoes, because she wrote: ‘it’s the kind of novel I’ll turn to on a grey day, when the world seems against me, and I want my spirits lifting without having to think too deeply about anything’.
For more Book Beginnings on Friday see Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader.
BooksPlease 