Re-read 2024 for my OU course and I'm adding a star, as I liked it much better this time around. I think the bits I wanted to be stated in a more clear cut fashion on a first read are in fact presented as the protagonist feeling her way and at times believing two things at once. I didn't actually skip the fairy tale sections this time around, but I do wish they had been shorter.

2014: I found it hard to read this as fiction, since it is (I understand) closely based on the author's own experiences. The first third was a very amusing account of Jeanette's childhood with a father who barely existed in the text and a mother whose focus is the mission field and who has adopted Jeanette to prepare her for becoming a missionary herself. The tone is one of dry detachment, which works well for stories such as Jeanette going deaf and her mother assuming she is instead having a deep religious experience, Jeanette failing to fit in at school, her mother's attitude to Next Door etc.

Then Jeanette gets older and I found it hard to work out what she really thought about the church. She becomes a preacher and evangelist in her local community at around the same time that she is discovering she is a lesbian and starts having relationships with girls. There is no exploration of whether Jeanette struggled with what the bible has to say about this - she just repeats "to the pure, all things are pure".

Her first relationship is discovered, her mother and pastor sweep in and try to exorcise her and this is described in the same detached way. Jeanette talks to different coloured demons and gives in as it is easier. She goes back to preaching (really?) and, in what I think is a truly excellent section, breaks with the church when her mother blames Jeanette's sexuality on the fact that women have had inappropriately prominent roles in their church, which should have been reserved for men.

The final chapter, which shows Jeanette returning home for Christmas after living away for a few years contains no resolution. Her mother has not changed, Jeanette has not changed, you have to read really carefully to work out that her father is still on the scene. It is not clear how her mother has decided to let Jeanette even enter the house.

I was disappointed with this book. I tried really hard for the first few "fairy tale" sections to work out how they related to the main story; by the end I was skipping them. ( )

This is the story of a young girl growing up in a very strange family where her mother is a fanatical Pentecostal Born Again Christian and has chosen to adopt Jeanette in order to bring her up as a missionary to preach in Africa etc. Jeanette's home education revolves around this and leaves her with strange gaps in her knowledge despite her innate curiosity, and no means of relating to children outside the community. Everyone she knows is much older than her and involved in their church. Eventually her mother is forced by the local authority to send her to school, but Jeanette's religious views disturb both the other children and the teachers and form an insurmountable barrier. It is not until she is a teenager and meets another girl her own age that she forms her first real emotional attachment - which becomes a physical relationship and leads to the beginning of her estrangement from her upbringing.

In between this we have various mythical interludes, mainly based on the Arthurian legends, which reminded me of some of Jane Yolen's fiction. I'm afraid I couldn't really work out exactly how these related to the story.

My main problem was that the distancing slightly jokey tone of the book meant that I couldn't really relate to the character. Even when she is betrayed by her friend, it seems a bit superficial and skated over, and I couldn't help contrasting this to the TV adaptation in which that part of the story - with the 'exorcism' by the awful pastor and her mother etc - was horrifying and traumatic. Those characters simply don't come across with the same level of awfulness as I recall from the dramatised version. Her exploitation by an older lesbian who exploits her while seeming to offer her refuge is also very low key and treated incidentally. The ending is also rather odd as she has had to leave and fend for herself, but then goes back and her mother is suddenly quite all right towards her and the whole thing just stops with no conclusive ending as if a page was missing. I'm afraid this was one of the few instances for me where the TV version was better than the book so I can only give it a 3 star rating. ( )

I went into this only knowing "classic British lesbian novel" so I was surprised to find that although it's an *important* part of the book, most of the attention is not really on lesbian stuff and in some ways any other reason you might leave a cultish religious community could stand in for it. Most of the book is a sensitive and well observed portrait of life growing up in an Evangelical community in a small town. There's a lot of Characters, even when they only get a few lines. There's attention paid to the backdrop of changes and the regular social life of the town. Most notably it's told with a lot of laugh out loud humour while still always feeling real and sincere. The complex emotions around not living up to your family's expectation and the struggle with leaving behind a community that's rejected you are well shown. I'm not feeling very articulate today but there's a lot here, all great and really well told and thoughtful. ( )

Jeanette Winterson does an excellent job narrating her first book. Authors who narrate their own books can be disappointing but luckily for me not in this case.

At first I found the interpolation of short bits of other stories (such as Sir Percival) confusing and irritating but as the book progressed, the connections between these and the main plot became intriguing.

( )

What a triumph of a book! This is my first Winterson level, and it made me so happy - as a queer woman who was raised in a Christian household (Catholic school, Sunday school, the whole shebang) I saw parts of myself I recognized in there. The writing is beautiful, the story is amazing, and the imagery and themes - oranges, betrayal - are very prominent but without it being like Winterson is knocking you over the head with how obvious it is. Truly an amazing book and a wonderful piece of LGBT fiction, even though Winterson herself doesn't like the book being called a 'gay book'. ( )