PAULA XIBERRAS FROM TASMANIA One summer’s secrets lead to accountability
The evolution of chocolate from bitter to sweet
Trish Morey has visited Tasmania three times, most recently last November for a writers retreat at Freycinet. It was a creative time with ocean and stormy weather providing an inspiring backdrop to the retreat. Storms or rather stormy relations figure in Trish’s latest book ‘One Summer Between Friends’.
I spoke to Hobart author Karen Brooks about her book ‘The Chocolate Maker’s Wife’. An academic, Karen has also served in the army, acted and authored!
The novel’s main protagonist, Sarah is called back to her former home on Lord Howe Island after her mother sustains a broken hip and requires help to run her shop. It’s not a happy homecoming for Sarah who is dealing with a failed marriage and a failed promotion at work. The smallness of Lord Howe Island means she will come into contact with her two former best friends Floss and Jules. The fact they are former best friends makes for claustrophobic As well as being a story confrontations on the of mending broken small island. Both women have settled into family life, Floss is married with five children and Jules has a four year old daughter that is a painful reminder to Sarah.
‘The Chocolate Maker’s Wife’ is written in the setting of Restoration London, a time beset with medical and natural disaster, the plague and the fire of London respectively. Central to this chaos are characters fitting of the time, with an equal measure of the brutality they live through but softened by love. Similarly the backdrop of the story of chocolate coats its initial bitterness with the addition of sweetness that made it palatable just like love makes the brutality of the times sweeter. So it is that bitterness and sweetness of equal measure flavour the novel.
relationships, the novel is about the brokenness in gender equality and in employment with the highly qualified Sarah being passed over for a young male recruit.
As well as being a story of mending broken relationships, the novel is about the brokenness in gender equality and in employment with the highly qualified Sarah being passed over for a young male recruit. But Sarah is not passed over for her brother when it comes to deciding who helps out in the shop. Her parents believing, in another example of gender inequality, that, as the girl she is the one who should take that role. Tricia was able to draw on her own experience in accounting to give this aspect of the novel credibility. One Summer Between Friends by Trish Morey is out now, published by Harlequin.
The main protagonist Rosamunde Tomkins grows up poor both in physical comforts and emotional ones. Unloved by her family she is given in marriage to a much older nobleman, owner of a chocolate house, a place that seduces with its drinking chocolate. Rosamunde inherits the business on her husband’s passing.
Rosamunde’s story reads like a fairy-tale and this is what Karen, as a lover of fairy tales wanted in her novel. The parallel with chocolate is clear, Rosamunde from her lowly past has had her share of bitterness so much so she can appreciate sweetness when it arrives. Karen gives us an amazing window on the restoration times a decadent naughty period, but it was also a period of religious purity that was manifested in people’s names. This is illustrated, somewhat ironically in Rosmunde’s brothers called ‘Fear God’ and ‘Glory’. The names were actual names taken from a prayer ‘Praise be to God in whom we fear’. The Chocolate Makers Wife by Karen Brooks is out now, published by Harper Collins.
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