Joe is a constant presence in the book, even though Jay hasn’t seen him for a long time. In what way is this a story about the power of memory and the past?

Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris | Goodreads

She is currently Chair of the Society of Authors, and sits on the Board of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society. Time Trips (2015). A collection of Doctor Who stories by various authors, including the Joanne Harris novella The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller. This book has her traditional split writing style with parts set in the past and parts set in the present, the past bits very much have the magical feeling of the endless summer that you only have as a kid and you also find in some Stephen King stories like IT and Stand by me. The summary advertises it as a mystery but really that part hardly matters. It's a small grain of intrigue surrounded by a massive bowl of poetic vegetables, for better of worse. Now Harris Magic is never really magic (except the Norse books and the fairy tales) but it's the kind of magic you can choose to believe is real but maybe it's also just the magic you find in the small things in life. Her books are the closest I ever get to reading what I call Mummy Literature, which mainly features unexpected romances in charming small villages with a cupcake shop on the cover and a woman in a polka-dot dress... But I love her novels because, unlike those Mummy books, her novels aren't about bubbly pretty young things who get a prince when they least expect it after a bad break up. They are about real things and independence and rawness and grief and they make you want to live a wilder, less artificial life and enjoy every damn fruit you eat. It's only a matter of not losing hope completely and let others surprise you, with one foot in the Earth and the other one suspended in the air, letting the wind blow where it has to.

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Mireille is Marise's mother in law. A stubborn, unhappy old lady, she detests Marise, believing that she has destroyed her son Tony's life, ultimately driving him to suicide. Another issue between them is that Marise will not let her see her granddaughter, Rosa, as she would like nothing better than to take full custody of her. Whether she believes it or not, Mireille would tell everyone that Rosa is being mistreated. Harris's books are now published in over fifty countries and have won a number of UK and international awards, including: Some of Harris's recurrent themes are issues of identity, mother/child relationships, the emotional resonance of food, the magic and horror of everyday things, the outsider in the community, faith and superstition, and the joy of small pleasures. She has spoken out against entrenched sexism in the literary field, and she has discussed how she weaves a critique of sexist attitudes into her fiction: Joe’s garden is his life. In what way would you say this novel is a story about the importance of nature in our increasingly urbanized lives?

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Trees (4 October 2011). "British Tree Week: Best woodland walks". The Daily Telegraph. London . Retrieved 30 August 2012. The story itself is narrated by a bottle of wine. How does this narration allow the author to look at the perspectives of different characters? What does it add to the narrative? All these events lead to the entire city shunning the family, and following one situation too many, they flee in separate directions, barely in time escaping death by the neighbors' wrath and need to designate a scapegoat. Of course, there is also the love aspect, a childhood friend, Paul, whom she eventually lets in. Together they learn to heal. If not forget, but to accept the past, their indivual secrets, and Framboise finally makes amends with her mother. The main characters are Joe an eccentric old man who brews wine, gardens, makes pouches of herbs that protect against bullies layman's alchemy he calls it and Jay a young lad who admires Joe and learns much of life from him the story follows Jay into adulthood in alternating chapters.Joe’s rituals (the perimeter sachets, the special plantings) are a kind of domestic magic. What do you understand by the phrase? Why are these rituals central to the way Joe lives his life?