Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

 genre: fiction

Jeanette knows that her mother has dedicated her to God.  Her path has been laid out for her, straight and narrow, according to the Good Book and filled with All Good Things.  Jeannette's mother does not doubt.  And into this evangelical, zealous world, Jeannette grows up and learns something about herself that is just not ever, ever, going to have a place along that straight and narrow.  How does one disentangle oneself from that conundrum?  Leave church, your family, your world?  Leave your own desires, your own nature, behind?  With wit and tenderness, Jeannette tries to figure it out.  

I loved the narrative of this story - the words are so intentional and sometimes so striking.  Jeannette's mother is off-the-charts and her crazytown really did make me chuckle sometimes - as blatantly homophobic and painful as it was.  I had a harder time with the allegorical interludes that, instead of enriching the story, just distracted me.  I'm sure there is something to them, I just didn't always want to use my brainpower to figure out what it was so I skimmed them to move on with the story.  A lovely debut novel that really made me feel compassion for Jeanette, the girl she was and the woman she became.