Reviews with content warning for Lesbophobia - Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever.

Heart-wrenching and special.

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mold_munchr's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I've really struggled writing about how this book made me feel. It's a lot of things, and I dont know if I'd describe it as beautiful or nice in any way, and yet reading this book meant a lot to me. So much of the story felt as though someone had entered my mind and took all my experiences, and then set them 30 years earlier in another country - which I think speaks to just how universal a queer story of religious bigotry is. It made me cry. The fantasy passages especially just hit close to home for some reason, and Winterson's use of biblical imagery was beautiful and added so much to the story (though these elements might be hard to follow if you haven't had a lot of exposure to hardcore christianity).

Mostly, though, it's a story about a complex mother/daughter relationship. I really appreciated how female-centred it was (I kept forgetting Jeanette even had a father) - this book just isn't ABOUT men, so why should they take up a significant amount of space in the writing?

This review falls short of describing this book, I don't know how to encapsulate how it made me feel. It is the realization of an experience I've struggled to put into words so many times, and somehow she pulled it off.

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jselliot's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Despite being such a short book, it was nevertheless a slow read for me. The vignettes that the main character distracted herself with - including the dalliance on the King Arthur cast - I mostly ended up skimming, because I read multiple of them and they seemed to bear little relevance to the main story. But the main story itself was compelling, so I kept reading. The path of the protagonist from start to finish was certainly fraught with her upbringing and trying to navigate adulthood effectively on her own, which wasn't at all aided by her mother's abuse. Being semi-autobiographical, though, I suppose the very nature of the story may be why the subject was never touched again. Self-edits to maintain a degree of privacy on one's thoughts and experiences.

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nicnevin's review

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A semi-autobiographical account of a life of a child brought up in an extreme religious background and the backlash she received when her lesbianism was discovered, I couldn't put it down. I found my mind wandering through on the fairy tale aspects - I was vastly less interested in those than the actual story.

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