Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7303 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780802135162
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Customer Reviews

One of the most beautiful, poetic books in existence!
Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical novel is one of the most beautifully written story of a middle-class girl struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality, creativity, passion vs. her family/society's inflexible "formed opinions". The story of the persecution of a girl because of her sexual preference (in this case, lesbianism) is not new. It's how Ms. Winterson presents her story. Fresh. Alive. Witty. Funny. Heartbreaking at times. Imaginative. Almost like you were holding a piece of someone's soul in your hands rather than merely a book. I noticed that one reviewer mentioned that the book's sexual nature is vulgar. I do not find this so. Even if it is, so what? Life is vulgar. Only those fond of sweeping the dirt under the carpet so that it stays out of sight (or those who drive lesbian girls from their house/church and pretend they don't exist) will disagree with the innate vulgarity of all life. This book is the antidote for that kind of sanitized thinking. This book exposes that sanitized Christian middle-class thinking is weird, almost alien when observed sanely by a third party standing on the outside. This book celebrates life. Read it.

Evangelical Christianity meets its match
Published in England in 1985, this first novel (autobiography?) is a story of a girl adopted as a baby into an evangelical Christian family in the Midlands, and raised with good humor and matter-of-fact, everyday, unquestioned love ("I cannot recall a time when I did not know that I was special"), strict religious teachings, a lot of structure, strong opinions coming from all corners. As a child, she's proud of her eccentric, high-achieving mom; she's her best student, too. The household and small community is a bubbling stew of English coziness, friends and neighbors, superstition, religious fervor and misinformation, vulgarity, harsh pronouncements and oddly good-natured fanatical beliefs.

The girl soaks it up -- to a point. Things begin to come apart, inevitably, and later still, as a teen, there's the narrator's growing knowledge that she is passionately, yearningly, and quite happily in love with a girl her age named Katy -- and no amount of exorcism will change that. The affair proceeds. Winterson is smart enough to put it all together with grace and humor. Her bright and resourceful protagonist travels a great and difficult path, avoiding all the predictable plot formulas. No whining or self-pity, either.

There is incisive wit, a smart and brave presentation of the (sometimes appalling) facts; very good use of myth, history and politics, fairy tales, Bible and church miscellany; amazing observation. This is a detailed and often funny picture of a truly strange household, a great girl, and there's a lot of love -- in this wonderful novel.

The satire bites, but the emotions remain detached
This story of a young girl discovering her homosexuality within the oppressive confines of a strict Pentecostal society left me with mixed feelings. I felt that Winterson exposed the hypocrisies inherent in the Church's "love the sinner, loathe the deed" mentality (as well as many other attitudes) with an extremely sharp sense of satire - a real strength of the novel. She also brings many of these revelations across with a gentle humour which intensifies their irony as it brightens the novel. However, I felt that the depiction of the central character's "coming out" was somewhat detached and passionless. I also found Winterson's juxtaposition of fantastic "King Arthur"-style episodes with the main narrative to be somewhat crude; they could have been woven in with more fluidity and made their parallels with the story more apparent.

As a criticism of the Church's often hypocritical views on love and sexuality, this novel was bitingly effective. But as a really human story of a young woman discovering with her sexuality, it was curiously unemotive.