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Book Reviewed by:Shimmering with the incandescence and irresistible magic of the novels of Alice Hoffman, Joanne Harris, and Aimee Bender, Katharina Hagena's smash international bestseller, The Taste of Apple Seeds, is a story of love and loss that will captivate your heart.
When Iris unexpectedly inherits her grandmother's house in the country, she also inherits the painful memories that linger there. Should she keep it or sell it? The choice is not easy, for the cottage is a place of enchantment and sensual mystery where currant jam tastes of tears, blue sparks crackle at the touch of fingertips, love makes apple trees bloom - and dark secrets pulsate in the house's nooks and shadows...
Hagena’s lyricism is richly rewarding. Her account, in Iris’s voice, of grandmother Bertha’s sliding into dementia is beautiful and sad, and seems piercingly true-to-life...But the real core of the book is its sensuality, the unexpected tastes and sights and sounds that it evokes, like the surprising taste of marzipan in the seeds of a Boskoop apple...continued
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(Reviewed by Jennifer G Wilder).
Katharina Hagena has set The Taste of Apple Seeds in a rural corner of northwest Germany, in the fictional farming village of Bootshaven. Geographical clues in the novel place Bootshaven in the state of Lower Saxony, in the North German plain region south of Hamburg and north of Bremen. It's a terrain not unlike the low-lying plains of neighboring Holland. The land is flat and fertile, with sand beneath a layer of peaty loam. Hagena calls it a "rain-soaked" place, full of rivers, lakes, canals, locks, and millponds.
The architectural heritage of the region includes a smattering of Dutch-style windmills, one of which makes it into the book as a museum. The historic farmhouses of the region are lovely to look at and have a long ...
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