Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is a compelling novel about a young woman dealing with the pressures of conformity in a world that demands she be something she is not. Jeanette is gay. The world she has known, the world of the church, shuns such behaviour. She was raised to be a missionary by her extremely controlling and zealous mother. Her path was laid out before her. And Jeanette was relatively obedient to begin with. She was ready to accept this life of servitude to God. She didn’t know any

An unassuming coming-of-age tale about love, religion, and repression, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit conducts a moving psychological study of a young British lesbian. Across the novel’s eight chapters, Winterson follows a fictionalized version of herself, Jeanette, as she grows up in a strict, working-class Protestant household; in plain but incisive prose, the author considers the teen girl’s struggle to reconcile her sexuality with her faith, charts the highs and lows of her first romances wi...

When I was a child, I had found a pair of gloves in the middle of the street in my cul-de-sac. They were black and worn with a little embroidered heart at each wrist. I slipped them on and flexed my fingers, amazed at how nicely they fit. I took them home and put them in my sock drawer, only taking them out on Thursdays for my bike ride down the street to piano lessons.This book is exactly like those gloves. I found this book while on a field trip for pre-college English class, crammed in backwa...

"Oranges is an experimental novel," says Jeanette Winterson in her thoroughly obnoxious introduction: "its interests are anti-linear...You can read in spirals." It's nothing of the sort. It's a standard semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, interspersed with some sort of Arthurian malarkey.Coming out stories from the 80s and 90s aren't aging terribly well; they're too specifically grounded in that period. David Sedaris is a little wincey in hindsight, too. But this one from 1985 is fine as

Meh.

favorite excerpts: "I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.""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 sid...

I found this book completely baffling from beginning to end. I couldn't tell if it was because I wasn't raised religious, I wasn't raised in England, or because I wasn't raised by lunatics. I felt that something had been utterly lost in translation.Sometimes I got the impression that the author had been issued a challenge to write sentences that no one in human history had ever written before. I started keeping a notebook of the strangest sentences. A few gems: "Our crocodile weaved in and out,

Jeanette Winterson is masterful in the way she captures her readers. She has such talent, and is one of the most unique writers that I have ever had the privilege to read. I would gladly read anything, with Winterson's name attached to it.As this is Winterson's first acclaimed novel, I was pleasantly surprised to find how beautiful it was. It was written with honesty, innocence and was told in black and white. The story is based on Winterson's time with her Mother, and the goal for Jeanette to e...

Oranges is a comforting novel. Its heroine is someone on the outside of life. She’s poor, she’s working class but she has to deal with the big questions that cut across class, culture and colour. Everyone, at some time in their life, must choose whether to stay with a ready-made world that may be safe but which is also limiting, or to push forward, often past the frontiers of commonsense, into a personal place, unknown and untried. Winterson writes in her introduction to Oranges, and in this

THIS IS A NUMBERS GAMEAccording to my Goodreads shelf, I have read 490 novels. If Joyce Carol Oates, Marcel Proust and William Gass have anything to do with it, I’ll never make 500. But I want to see that magic number 500 there! I want to be able to say “I have read 500 novels, hear me roar!” So, I’m eating up SHORT novels like a madman right now, never mind the quality, feel the pages! 300? Too long! 250? Still too long!Oranges is short and sweet; really, short and bittersweet. It was drop dead...

I seriously had no idea that this year I would read 2 lesbian books (& 4 gay ones!: “The Line of Beauty,” “The Mad Man,” On the Road,” &, of course, let us never forget “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”). It's an obscure genre, if you ask me. “Tipping the Velvet” was disappointingly bland, although racy in parts and historically accurate, but it still felt a tad conventional. This, Winterson’s first uber-acclaimed novella, is philosophical and entertaining and funny, part autobiography and pa...

4.5★(Read and reviewed February 9, 2017)UPDATE:I listened to an absolutely delightful 2016 podcast of Richard Fidler's conversation with Winterson where she openly discusses her childhood, family, and upbringing. There seems to be no bitterness, rather a lot of humour and understanding. Have a listen. I love hearing her talk anyway. :) It's here:http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2...-----This book of fiction won the Whitbread Award (now the Costa) for first novel, but it appears to be an autob...

I tried to write this review eight minutes before I was supposed to go to work. I did not meet the deadline. I only mention this so I can make sure you know what quality shit you're getting when you shop here. My reviews occasionally take longer than eight minutes to compose.Though much, much better than my miserable first experience with Winterson, I am still unsure about her after reading this, still plagued by minor annoyances. As with that other one, this book is riddled with what it seems t...

A delicious fruit bowl....Funny, clever, poetic, quirky, creative well written bittersweet story. Jeannette's innocence was so real......her heart pure. A terrific inspiring small book! Amazing how humor- and 'witty-charm' can transform sensitive situations. Thanks Cecily!

I've heard that her more recent take on the same material Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is even better. If that's true, I'm in for a truly superlative treat, because I loved this book to the bones. I want to read it again and again to savour its sweet delights.Maybe Laura Doan's essay 'Sexing the Postmodern', about Winterson's work and theme development over this and two subsequent novels The Passion and Sexing the Cherry gave me a hunger to read this that made it taste so good ('hunger

Thinly-veiled memoir of the author's youth growing up with a religous nutter of a mother and a father whose character was subsumed entirely by his monster of a wife's.I don't know why some girls become lesbians, presumably most are just made that way, but I do think some become that way through choice. In the book its almost as if there was one thing calculated to offend the mother and the entire community of zealots as a mortal sin, but not offend anyone else in the world, the only possible reb...

Rating: 5* of fiveThe Book Description: Jeanette, the protagonist of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the author's namesake, has issues--"unnatural" ones: her adopted mam thinks she's the Chosen one from God; she's beginning to fancy girls; and an orange demon keeps popping into her psyche. Already Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical first novel is not your typical coming-of-age tale. Brought up in a working-class Pentecostal family, up North, Jeanette follows the path her Mam has set f...

‘To eat of the fruit means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings.’Jeanette Winterson writes prose that seeps into you the way warm sunshine does at the final edges of winter. She has a distinct voice with a confident cadence that can seamlessly sway between realism and the fantastical or fairy tale elements, harmonizing each aspect of her storytelling into a grand orchestral narrative that in each of her books pushes boundaries and doesn’t shy away from exp...

I was amazed at how much this reminded of Boyhood by J. M. Coetzee, right down to the protagonist's—uhm—complicated relationship with her mother. However, the autobiographical narrator in Oranges outpaces Boyhood's John by being allowed to grow up, and this gives greater scope/depth to the book as a whole. The mother in this one certainly takes the cake, and she probably shares much with the mother in a certain popular horror novel which I have yet to read—okay, maybe not quite. Winterson's work...