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4.21 AVERAGE
4.21 AVERAGE
adventurous
informative
reflective
tense
fast-paced
A book for lovers of metaphor
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
Thank you, Tin House for sending me Forbidden Fruit by Katie Goh. Out today and just a really beautiful read. I didn't want to put this one down.
Memoir, yes, but also very much a history lesson as well. Observations and moments in the book that made me stop and re-read a sentence or passage to soak it in and marvel at how Goh's head puts together such gorgeous prose.
While this is a wonderful book about a family, it is also a look at our identity, our past, where it leads us in our future, social issues (racism, covid, just to name a couple) and what, I think is most interesting, is how she was able to find the common thread of an orange to link everything together. It isn't a far stretch either. She leads us through with such ease.
Goh sets out on a global trip from Ireland to Malaysia, Europe, America to learn not just about herself, but also takes us along on her journey and let's us learn about a history that shows how we are all a bit more connected rather than foreign to one another.
Memoir, yes, but also very much a history lesson as well. Observations and moments in the book that made me stop and re-read a sentence or passage to soak it in and marvel at how Goh's head puts together such gorgeous prose.
While this is a wonderful book about a family, it is also a look at our identity, our past, where it leads us in our future, social issues (racism, covid, just to name a couple) and what, I think is most interesting, is how she was able to find the common thread of an orange to link everything together. It isn't a far stretch either. She leads us through with such ease.
Goh sets out on a global trip from Ireland to Malaysia, Europe, America to learn not just about herself, but also takes us along on her journey and let's us learn about a history that shows how we are all a bit more connected rather than foreign to one another.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I'm obsessed with any combination of food writing, nature/science, history, and personal memoir, so I knew this one was my cup of tea! The history of oranges, citrus cultivation, and international trade is truly fascinating, and the way Katie Goh infuses her own family's story into the narrative drew me in right away. A stunning book that will forever change the way you look at your morning grapefruit!
emotional
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
A love novel to oranges and the beauty/pain of not feeling "whole".
informative
reflective
slow-paced
In Foreign Fruit, author Katie Goh covers the history of the orange fruit. It's intertwined with recollections & musings from her own experiences as a Malaysian-Chinese-Irish writer during the COVID pandemic, and other parts of her identity connected with her Asian heritage.
This one was good - I enjoyed it and thought a lot of the connections were really expertly drawn. I found several anecdotes really interesting, some new to me: I had no idea, for example, about the process of grafting & how it's given rise to all these varied citrus fruits from just three original "parent" fruits! The author talks candidly and vulnerably of her own cultural heritage and I really appreciated seeing that developed throughout.
I did struggle, quite a bit, to sit down and start it every time I tried. I think it probably took me a whole month and a half, start to finish, despite it only being about a 200 page book. I think I had some issues with the pacing, maybe? Like, it was all so connected that I sometimes struggled to take a breath and digest everything. I also found some of the historical information quite unengaging, so I would sometimes sit and read 5 or 6 pages before putting it down and getting distracted by other things. All of this is strange, given this style of informational/personal prose is typically exactly what works for me?
Overall, I liked this book, but it didn't quite hit enough for me. I'll be recommending to people interested in Asian diaspora stories, food history, journalists, and/or folks who express interest in postcolonial personal narratives.
Thanks to the author Katie Goh, the publisher Tin House Books, and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
This one was good - I enjoyed it and thought a lot of the connections were really expertly drawn. I found several anecdotes really interesting, some new to me: I had no idea, for example, about the process of grafting & how it's given rise to all these varied citrus fruits from just three original "parent" fruits! The author talks candidly and vulnerably of her own cultural heritage and I really appreciated seeing that developed throughout.
I did struggle, quite a bit, to sit down and start it every time I tried. I think it probably took me a whole month and a half, start to finish, despite it only being about a 200 page book. I think I had some issues with the pacing, maybe? Like, it was all so connected that I sometimes struggled to take a breath and digest everything. I also found some of the historical information quite unengaging, so I would sometimes sit and read 5 or 6 pages before putting it down and getting distracted by other things. All of this is strange, given this style of informational/personal prose is typically exactly what works for me?
Overall, I liked this book, but it didn't quite hit enough for me. I'll be recommending to people interested in Asian diaspora stories, food history, journalists, and/or folks who express interest in postcolonial personal narratives.
Thanks to the author Katie Goh, the publisher Tin House Books, and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
“As a child I thought loving two places—embodying two places in one body—meant dividing yourself. Now, I know that the act of loving multiplies the heart; it does not segment it” (142). <3
I am a citrus-lover—as all of my friends know—and Katie Goh’s sincere memoir has helped me to see this “foreign fruit” in a new light.
I devoured this! Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars for me, and I have been recommending it widely. It reminded me in some ways of another recent worthwhile read: Laing’s The Garden Against Time.
As Goh grapples with the slippery legacy of the orange, her geography is vast, alighting in California, Vienna, China, and beyond. This is a text that gracefully resists borders and simple classifications. As Goh asserts, hybridity and queerness live within and shape the text. Going a step further, Goh even writes: “The world is made of hybrids. Purity is an illusion” (85).
“The philosophers concede that a tree branch has the potential to burgeon into a rhizome. I wonder if they ever saw a citrus tree with branches of lemons, tangerines, and mandarins all growing from the same branch. The spontaneity of citrus, its instability and unreliability when grown from seed, strikes me as an anti-genealogical image full of queer potential” (69).
How to counteract the bitterness of violence, racism, and empire? Goh lays bare the grave imbalance between the ease of destruction and painstaking care and time of creation. The book itself begins with a first page that makes the reader’s stomach drop: news of the Atlanta spa shootings in 2021, which killed eight people—six of whom were Asian women. When Katie learns of the tragedy, she eats five oranges in a row, consuming citrus until she aches.
“The historian S.R. Dickman proposes that ‘One might say the British Empire blossomed from the seeds of citrus fruits,’ so crucial a role do the fruits’ antiscorbutic qualities play in colonial expansion” (129).
Katie skilfully harmonizes personal revelations with potent historical anecdotes. I was horrified to read more about President Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (inspiration for Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), which caused crops to be razed and mountains of oranges to be set ablaze in an effort to stabilize the economy of a hungry nation besieged by The Great Depression. Goh points out that it cost the United States $600,000 in 1938 and 1939 to destroy surplus citrus (163).
Also, the link between plant breeding and eugenics! Harrowing to say the least. For example, the work of Luther Burbank, who desired to breed people just like plants in an effort to “perfect the species” (169). This rhetoric led the state of California to sterilize 20,000 people between 1909 to 1979 who were deemed “unfit to reproduce” (169). This movement within the US in the early twentieth century quite literally inspired the Nazi Party after exchanges among scientists.
In addition, I had never before learned about The Great Leap Forward, an agricultural industrialization campaign (with an emphasis on manpower vs. machines) led by the Chinese Communist Party at the end of the 1950s. There are gaps in existing records, but this endeavor resulted in an estimated 40 million deaths from starvation, torture, natural disasters, and forced labor (189). And we're talking about 1959-1961! That makes me want to scream—such great loss in a narrow window of time.
“I had stepped over the frame and out of my life. Now I was watching from the gallery floor, as curious as a stranger, to see what would happen next” (73).
Reflecting on the art of seventeenth-century Holland, Katie broaches the topic of representation vs. presentation. A familiar and expected recreation compared to a departure, which sets the stage for something new. Could Foreign Fruit be accomplishing both at once?
“Now I relish the space between imitation and imagination, memory and fiction, real and unreal, organic and artificial. Perhaps it is there, in the cracks that run amongst singular, fixed positions, where we can cultivate our meanings, rather than forcing ourselves to choose a single story and, by doing so, exile all other possibilities” (199).
A book like biting into an orange, sweet and tart. Flavorful. Surprising. Satisfying.
I met Katie at an event for Gutter Magazine in Portobello, and she hosted the reading with true warmth and grace. I instantly felt at home around her. I resolved that very night to read her new book as soon as possible, and then Tin House sent me an ARC. Thank you! :’)
Content Warnings
Minor: Genocide, Gun violence, Racism, Rape, Mass/school shootings, Colonisation
informative
reflective
slow-paced
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
"Foreign Fruit" by Katie Goh is an intimate, revealing memoir not only about Goh's life but about the history of the orange. Goh has been comforted and seen by oranges her entire life. Like Goh, Oranges have a complicated history and have gone through waves of being accepted and removed from their orchards. To Goh and many of us, oranges are more then a fruit. With their own complex history there is much to be understood about the citrus.
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
i will be writing a longer review for foreign fruit later on. but i just want to say... oh my god. this one will stay with me for a long, long time.