Customer Reviews:
 Chocolat, Wine, Yum!! June 20, 2005
This book was so much fun to read! How it wove the past and the present together was just brilliant. If you've read "Chocolat" then, this is the next book you should be reading!!
 Quick read-not much else February 2, 2005
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
My mom left this book at my house.
So I thought..."Hey, free book."
If you read quickly and frequently you should go ahead and give this a try.
If you are a slow reader. . .spend your time on something with more substance.
After a fairly long drawn-out story with little humor and not much suspense I was surprised to find the final chapters to be reasonably satisfying.
Hence the two stars.
But I assure you there is zero "kung-fu" in this one.
Swampwater January 15, 2005
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I haven't read Chocolat, but I've seen the movie. It was good. Because of this, I naively assumed that the book must be even better, but after reading Harris' follow-up novel, Blackberry Wine, I know now that it must be a case of the movie surpassing the novel.
This book is terrible. Start to finish. I did not enjoy reading it, and I only finished it out of some absurd loyalty. To be perfectly honest, I am amazed that Harris wasn't embarrassed to put her picture on the bookjacket. It made me cringe, the open innocence to such a piece of shoddy crap. By the way, I'm relieved that Harris has overcome her dilemma and decided to live in London, despite being half-French. Misplaced modifier, or simply irrelevant...? Can't decide.
Her bloody main character, brilliant but apathetic writer (oh, marks for originality) Jay MacKintosh is so one-dimensional that I quickly stopped caring why he did things. His only consistency is his anger which, curiously enough, never fails to be misdirected. Harris takes up the omniprescent narrative with other characters infrequently, and always when it seems awkward, unnecessary, and unexpected. Just as she does with Jay, Harris is always careful to bore the reader during these annoying passages by telling them exactly what the character feels, instead of showing them. Basic rule of writing, hello? Basic education. Yes, admittedly we are inside the character's head, but, for Someone's sake, write it creatively or trash it altogether.
Anyway, there's not much to the story. Harris herself can't seem to decide what genre she's writing in, and I strongly suspect that she had Jay Mackintosh emulate her stream of consciousness writing style without the afterthough of editing, only he seems to be more successful at it than his careless creator. Unless the British spell "notice" as "notoice", I believe there is a typo as well. Is the book about a crazy man in a fugue, the bond between a boy and his mentor, carried into adulthood? Is it about the spirituality of gardening? A romance between two neighbors? A murder mystery/stalker tale? Sure, a GOOD writer could weave this all together to make a rich, engaging, plausible story, but Harris' talents seem to run awfully thin under such demands.
Despite being bitterly, bitterly disappointed, I am giving this more than one star. There are moments, perhaps even less, when Harris' potential winks through the manure. Some turns of phrase took me by surprise, and perhaps that's why I kept plugging forward. The image of Jay's girlfriend, Kerry, when they say goodbye, is so lightly touching (although she only sees fame-by-acquaintence slipping away) that I was surprised when she disappeared until the end of the novel, to emerge as her slap-worthy, opportunistic bitchself. These are sporadic and inconsistent glimmers of talent. Like pyrite, false gold.
Ho hum! December 30, 2004
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
After reading and watching Chocolat, I expected an equally delightful book with lovely characters. This book had dull characters, with whom one could hardly sympathize, a homely setting of no charm at all, and a dull plot, which only became interesting once the neighbor started talking to Jay; too little, too late. The alternating flashback chapters were so horribly useless as background material, I read them quickly, only to find myself bored once again by the tiresome plot of silly Jay and his shallow life among the not-quite-eccentrics of his French village. Pity!
 Too sentimental October 25, 2004
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Blackberry Wine is sickenly sweet in its sentimentality but it does score points for having a unique narrator. The flashbacks to Pog Hill distract from the present day story. The book is tighter and more compelling a read when those chapters are skipped. When the story finally moves away from Jay's fond memories of how great Joe was and goes to the mystery of Jay's neighbor and her daughter Rosa the story hits its stride. I wish it had focused more on them and less on "Jackapple Joe."
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