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Heidi J. De Vries

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May 22, 2002
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Jeanette Winterson
A birthday present from Sheila and Jon. Written in 1985, this was Winterson's first book, and many of the themes are here that she would develop further in her later writing. In particular she plays with the line between true story and fiction in her account of the coming-of-age of a young woman named Jeanette whose fundamental Christian upbringing is very much at odds with her emerging homosexuality. The story is the most linear of anything I've read by Winterson, though there are some wonderful hallucinatory digressions and twisted fairy tales. Winterson does a great job of showing the sheer lunacy of Jeanette's church, but I liked how she made the point that this church was a place where a woman could become a leader and have a measure of power that she might not have gained elsewhere in 1960s England. If Jeanette didn't like girls, she would have been a missionary and set out to convert the masses. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

"When thick rinds are used the top must be thoroughly skimmed, or a scum will form marring the final appearance."
—From The Making of Marmalade by Mrs Beeton

"Oranges are not the only fruit."
—Nell Gwynn



   



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09.05.03
The Baburnama
04.24.03
Tomorrow Now
04.14.03
The Fallen Curtain
04.07.03
The Gormenghast Novels
02.25.03
A Whistling Woman
01.31.03
A Free Range Childhood
01.20.03
The Mount
01.10.03
The Zine Yearbook, Volume IV
12.18.02
Coming out of the Woods
12.03.02
Susan Glaspell
11.13.02
Dr. Janson's New Vitamin Revolution
10.25.02
God at the Edge
10.15.02
Packinghouse Daughter
10.01.02
The Same Ax, Twice
09.12.02
Moral Hazard
09.09.02
One Degree West
08.29.02
Halflives
08.22.02
On Histories and Stories
08.12.02
The Minority Report
07.22.02
Storyville, USA
06.26.02
Zeitgeist
06.10.02
Spiritual Marketplace
05.22.02
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
05.10.02
Media Unlimited
04.26.02
Debating the Good Society
04.05.02
Against All Odds
03.21.02
Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks
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Passage
01.30.02
Postmodern Pooh
01.21.02
Toil
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Solitaire of Love
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The Seventies Now
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The Biographer's Tale
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Anxious Intellects
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The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory
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Rare Birds
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The Star Thrower
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A Passion for Books
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Sharpe's Eagle
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The Greatest of Marlys
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Sharpe's Rifles
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The Charterhouse of Parma
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Honky
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Frisco Pigeon Mambo
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Rimbaud
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Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men
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The Powerbook
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Darkness in El Dorado
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The House on Dream Street
05.15.01
Hollow City
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The Years with Laura Diaz
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Father of the Four Passages

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