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 Creation of Reality   February 13, 2001
 17 out of 19 found this review helpful

This novel has often been criticised as Winterson's best now that she has gone on to write several powerfully experimental novels. This is implying that she should have remained in these more familiar regions of experience or stuck to a slightly more conventional mode of narrative. What's tremendous about this novel is the way it works as a perfect springboard for the kind of fiction that is being so negatively criticised for its inventiveness. This is a story about a girl who is struggling with the conventions of a restrictive Pentecostal community in a small spot of England, but it is also about the interplay between reality and fiction in people's lives. Jeanette's fables are established to be as valid as the complex religious practices of her family. The characters of the novel constantly differ to a fictional artifice to hold together the reality they cannot understand. Tension builds when the fictional worlds that people struggle to hold into place contradicts other people's realities. This novel is a tribute to the fight for independence and survival. She powerfully asserts that there is a necessary space for these fictional parts of people's realities despite the conflict it will inevitably create. She suggests that the reality built in fiction is also the truth of our own fictions accepted as reality. The interplay of these two creates a living reality.


In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more.   April 9, 2005
 15 out of 17 found this review helpful


"We stood on the hill and my mother said, `This world is full of sin.' We stood on the hill and my mother said, `You can change the world.'"

Jeanette is an orphan child adopted my a fanatic Evangelical woman who believes that the child is sent to her by God. Jeanette's mother raises her with three strict ideas in mind for her- one, that she will be a missionary child... two, that she will be a servant of God... and three, that she will be a blessing. Her strict moral upbringing causes her severe grief when her mother has to enroll her into school at the age of seven. The children, the teachers, and even the administrators find her preaching attitude a bit unnerving. As a child her only friend is an older woman named Elsie Norris who is a bit of an eccentric, and her life is completely dominated by her mother's quest to convert all of the heathens in the world.

But when she is 14 she meets a young woman from the fish market who will compromise everything that Jeanette knows about herself, but does not bring her to lose her faith in God. Rather the opposite, through a series of events during this friendship she finds herself being drawn closer into the fervor of her faith. It is not until the affair comes to a climax that Jeanette really begins to question the path her mother has set her on.

"He turned to me.
`I love her.'
`Then you do not love God.'
`Yes, I love both of them.'
`You cannot.'"

The book skillfully touches on the controversy of homosexuality in the Christian community, and deals with many of the biased points of views of that religion that still exists to this day. This is a tremendous book. The story has such depths of drama, pathos, and heartbreaking desire that it is impossible not to get swept up in the story. The clever use of narration that Winterson uses is periodically punctuated with fairy tales, Arthurian references, and Alice in Wonderland references as well- something that surely surprised and delighted me, a literary fan from way back. It's no surprise that this debut novel won the Whitbread Prize for first fiction when it was published in 1985. This book has definitely secured me as a Winterson fan for life.


Good concept, witty, but tries too hard   September 8, 2003
 14 out of 17 found this review helpful

I read this book when I was first coming out as a lesbian. The humor drew me in from the first page, where the main character finds hilariously understated ways of describing her mother's black-and-white view of the world. The caricatured characters as viewed through the discerning and somewhat opinionated eyes of a child only add to the subtle (and not-so-subtle) humor, even when the book is exploring serious issues. If the book had continued like this, it would have been a brilliant, quirky coming-of-age/coming-out story.

In some ways, it still is. But this book suffers too greatly from a style that has become trendy since the nineties -- a sort of forced, breezy detachment that tries too hard to convey *something*, although precisely what that is is not clear. It seems to happen more when the author strays into the fairy tale that is clumsily interwoven with the story, or when she muses on the nature of reality. Musings that are presumably supposed to sound profound, instead sound hollow, empty, and slightly flippant. Maybe this author is ahead of her time, given that the book was written in 1985. I see more of this style in recent books than I see in books from the eighties.

This style conveys an image of a shallow main character who walks fast through life so she doesn't have to look too hard at it, preferring clever-sounding, pretty words instead of the truth, or indeed even the idea that reality exists at all. While her upbringing as depicted in the book -- growing up a lesbian in a dysfunctional Evangelical Christian household -- could lead a person to a view of the world like that, it's hard to tell whether this is the author's intent in the character, a pretentious affectation, or the actual view the author (and not just in her character's persona) is writing from. Whatever it is, it grated on my nerves after awhile, and after my first reading I skimmed these sections in order to avoid a mounting irritation with the narrator.

I have heard this book described as non-linear, and therefore confusing. The non-linearity (if it can even be called that) of the book was not a problem, but it was not carried off well. It read like a linear thinker trying too hard to fit a book into their own conception of non-linearity, influenced by postmodern thinking. Stories are inserted here and there, and attempts at reflection appear to depend more at times on whether words fit together prettily than whether they actually reflect anything. If a portrayal of emptiness is what this author is going for, she's succeeded.

I like the concept of the book, and many of the wry observations, which is perhaps why this is the only story in which I strongly prefer the movie to the book. The movie manages to capture the plot and the wit while shedding a lot of the excess verbal meanderings that weakened the book.