Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette WintersonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I picked this book at the library because of its adorable squat shape, like a roast beef sandwich on rye.
THEN... How is it that I never knew about Jeanette Winterson!?! This book is an absolute jewel of a story of a girl growing up and coming out in a religious fanatic family in Lancashire and all the bizarreness that entails.
I can't help but read it as a memoir, which is what I assumed I was reading, I suppose because the first-person narrator's name is Jeanette. Then I discovered that it is considered a novel and was Winterson's first.
Glancing at her biography on her website, though, I gather that a lot of Oranges is based, however loosely, in reality. So, I wasn't totally wrong about that.
My reading of this started out fitfully, curious but not very involved. Then I started liking it and then I realized that I was in the middle of an astoundingly unique story with a mesmerizing narrator who was NOT NEARLY telling us the whole story. She leaves us to imagine the details, which I think is a wholly successful strategy in this case.
This is a talented, imaginative and outrageous writer whose other books I will certainly pursue.
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I loved this book!!! Winterson is fantastic!
ReplyDeleteUpon reading your review, I don't think, "Oh, yeah, Mom has been trying to get me to read Oranges for years," or "somebody else I know adored this" or even "I really should go back to grading lab reports" (all of which are true), I thought, "I think it was a Jeanette Winterson novel that Mike was reading in the toilet in the Pulp Fiction reference in the British sit-com Spaced first episode of the second season". And I was right.
ReplyDeleteHer best book is The Powerbook. Another one I wept all the way through. Twice.
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