Lemons Are Not the Only Fruit

Personal Reflections To start off, we're thrown into the deep end a little bit. Technically the narration is starting at "the beginning" with her own childhood from when she was 7 years old (evoking the Biblical story of God's creation of the world in 7 days), but there are so many digressions and flashbacks where we cut from one scene to another that the narrator is reminded of that it can be hard to keep track of the current thread without re-reading the past few passages. We still do get a sense of forward progression, it just takes a while to complete some framing scenes (such as the narrator walking up the hill with her mother and then travelling through the valley of the Factory Bottoms to pick up some pest control items from Mrs. Arkwright). The overall result of this style is a very rich portrait of the narrator's life around this time, including the people and setting around her; it reminds me of Proust a lot. Even though going into this book with the kno...

Hi everyone! Sam here. As part of my studies for the English major at City College of San Francisco (specifically ENGL 1B ), I will be reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit  by Jeanette Winterson, and have been asked by my instructor to update a blog about it with regular updates to talk about my reading experience, impressions, and analysis of the novel, chapter by chapter. There will be about two of these a week over the next four weeks (with eight updates in total), starting tomorrow. So you can look forward to those! Regarding the title of this blog, I really enjoy sour fruits like lemons, so I decided to make a pun off of the book's title. As a lesbian reading a novel by a queer woman, I'm really excited to dig into this text and share my perspective with you all. For anyone reading this, I hope you enjoy it!