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renroree 's review for:
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
by Jeanette Winterson
Initially, the book was hard to get into. Honestly even that’s a lie, it took me to read 70-72% of the book to be genuinely interested in the story - the author’s introduction to the novel somehow being my favourite part over the novel itself.
This could just be a simple matter of me not being it’s target audience, not having key experiences a reader would need to be able to super impose oneself onto the protagonist or maybe I’m just kind of stupid and didn’t get whatever deep meaning it was trying to convey… either way it took a worryingly long time for me to get even slightly invested.
Although I do have my qualms with its’ narration (author came off pretentious at times under the guise of individuality and thematic exploration in her prose), the one thing that really put me off was the novels structuring.
The pacing of events was one of the few things I enjoyed, although I found it hard to distinguish at what points the main protagonist had aged due to the lack of change in…? maturity of her perspective? Not sure how to word it, but I didn’t feel as though I saw the character come into her identity and that caused her characterisation to fall flat to me.
But, what especially bugged me, were the random parable interludes in the story - I don’t feel like they held any distinct, special tie to the novel: the narrator would convey one theme particularly well through real-time events and internal dialogue then break into a fairy tale which conveyed the exact same thing but with fancier writing. I suspect this again may just be me not getting key points of the book which would’ve helped this make sense buuuut even then, I wasn’t invested enough in the story, character or narrator to try and figure it out.
The ending however, I really enjoyed… essentially the last chapter/ last 20-30 pages. The way Jeanette ruminates on so many previously mentioned themes, parables and key parts of internal dialogue from earlier on in the book gave the book a very cyclical feel, all her thoughts and ideas whilst growing up culminating into an especially beautiful piece of prose (it was in these 5-10 pages where I found my favourite quotes of the entire book).
I would’ve put this as a solid 1/10 but it’s ending put it up a whole star. I may not be being entirely fair to the book, so I’ll probably go and search for some in-depth explorative essays to help me understand and then come edit this review...
This could just be a simple matter of me not being it’s target audience, not having key experiences a reader would need to be able to super impose oneself onto the protagonist or maybe I’m just kind of stupid and didn’t get whatever deep meaning it was trying to convey… either way it took a worryingly long time for me to get even slightly invested.
Although I do have my qualms with its’ narration (author came off pretentious at times under the guise of individuality and thematic exploration in her prose), the one thing that really put me off was the novels structuring.
The pacing of events was one of the few things I enjoyed, although I found it hard to distinguish at what points the main protagonist had aged due to the lack of change in…? maturity of her perspective? Not sure how to word it, but I didn’t feel as though I saw the character come into her identity and that caused her characterisation to fall flat to me.
But, what especially bugged me, were the random parable interludes in the story - I don’t feel like they held any distinct, special tie to the novel: the narrator would convey one theme particularly well through real-time events and internal dialogue then break into a fairy tale which conveyed the exact same thing but with fancier writing. I suspect this again may just be me not getting key points of the book which would’ve helped this make sense buuuut even then, I wasn’t invested enough in the story, character or narrator to try and figure it out.
The ending however, I really enjoyed… essentially the last chapter/ last 20-30 pages. The way Jeanette ruminates on so many previously mentioned themes, parables and key parts of internal dialogue from earlier on in the book gave the book a very cyclical feel, all her thoughts and ideas whilst growing up culminating into an especially beautiful piece of prose (it was in these 5-10 pages where I found my favourite quotes of the entire book).
I would’ve put this as a solid 1/10 but it’s ending put it up a whole star. I may not be being entirely fair to the book, so I’ll probably go and search for some in-depth explorative essays to help me understand and then come edit this review...