Rating:  Summary: Could have been longer. Review: This is a somewhat bizarre book but i enjoyed reading it through it's peverse nature it really says alot and there are alot of points whether they be artistic or in the imagination that really hit hard, it's a good book to read thats hard to put down it's just a shame that it's such a short book, i was excpecting a little more from this aswell after reading the colourful 'oranges are not the only fruit' beforehand but sexing the cherry has many strong points throughout and makes an inovative read so if you get the chance to read this then take it as it's clearly a well stipulated book.
Rating:  Summary: This is a remarkable book Review: This is an amazing book! The title may make people think it is a preverted book but no! When I first decided to read it I was a bit close minded. But after the first few pages the author lured me into her tale. Being 13 I got a lot of negative comments about reading this book. I do not think I have read anything that had made me think so much in a long time. Sexing the Cherry is sort of a philosophy book only it is done in a story and it is not at all like reading a philosophy book. You do stop and just think about what you read. I think Sexing the Cherry should be required reading for everyone. I thank God I found this book. READ IT! Warning: If you do not like books that require thinking then do not read this.
Rating:  Summary: A Visceral Confection... Review: This is the first Winterson book I've ever read, but, rest assured, I'll read more... The thing that is great about this book is that WInterson weaves these seemingly unrelated storylines and fairy tales and, sometimes, mere images and concepts together into this wildly imaginative and intellectually challenging souffle' of a book. I had never considered time like I do now. I had never even questioned so many of the basic ideas and concepts that I once held dear, until this book ripped them to pieces and said, "All that stuff is just crap you have been taught to believe. Why not start figuring it out for yourself?" And that is what I am trying to do. Thank God for Jeanette Winterson. She is jewel.
Rating:  Summary: 100 Years of Solitude meets Mother Goose Review: This was my first Winterson novel. Although the book at first may seem whimsical and even silly, when given a closer look a deeper subject matter can be found. Winterson discusses the themes of gender ambiguity, the nature of time, love as well as other important themes. I would encourage anyone open-minded person to tackle this book and look for the deeper meaning within.
Rating:  Summary: perhaps you're missing something... Review: While Sexing is not my favorite Winterson novel, I can't help to reply to comments about it being disorganized and cobbled together from random plotlines. Just a suggestion to all of you, even those who have read it and liked, try reading The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot first and then go back and reread this book. I think you will discover something interesting...
Rating:  Summary: Great Book. Review: While this novel (if I can call it that? ) brings up several questions about gender stereotypes, relationships between the sexes (and humans in general for that matter), our views of past and present, and the nature of language these are not the only reasons that the book appeals to me. The book is a breath of fresh air and can be read as simply a fun frolic. Read the book......but keep an open mind!
Rating:  Summary: Winterson as the Queen of Fantasy in Contemporary Literature Review: Winterson has already stunned the readers with the blend of her power of imagination and lesbian narrative in the first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (winner of Whitebread Prize for the best first fiction). In Sexing the Cherry, she extends her talent and keeps giving the readers surprises. The beginning of the novel is set in the early seventeenth century with two major characters: Jordan, a young man in Renaissance England, and the Dog Woman, who is gigantic in size and adopts Jordan in the way Mosses is in Bible. With the author's fantasy, the closure of the novel brings the readers to the late twentieth century. Winterson uses less than two hundred pages of words to tell an amazing story which lasts for over three hundred years. The book is about different kinds of timeless loves including the passion between a woman and an adopted son, the hidden gay desire between Tradescant and Jordan, the elusive but beautiful heterosexual love between Jordan and Fortunata, and also the lesbianism found in the reconstruction of fairy tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The novel is like a dream told with interruptions. The author alternates the narrative with two different points of views, which exposes the readers to the deeper thoughts of the characters while we are also shifting between different times and spaces. Sexing the Cherry is more ambitious more Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in representing lesbianism. The reconstruction of The Twelve Dancing Princesses offers a feminist perspective in reading the novel. The dancing princesses are empowered by the author during the process of reconstruction to choose their own fates and rewrite the their predetermined heterosexual endings. Men are no longer the final destination of women's romance. Women can either be independent or seek the same-sex for love. The frequent allusions and to characters in Greek mythologies, like Castor, Pollux and Sappho, strengthens the centrality of homosexuality in the narrative. Winterson, as a postmodern novelist, breaks down the narrative and fills the gaps with the power of intertextuality. She brings the ancient Greece lesbianism and gaiety back to her own story, which is set in the early seventeenth century, and the story itself expands and stretches towards modernity. Sexing the Cherry is, therefore, a book witnessing the evolution and developments of history of homosexuality that gives us a fictional account on how this 'alternative' passion lives through different times. Winterson is smart in presenting different points of view in her novel. in Sexing the Cherry, she uses the images of a banana and a pineapple to represent the voices of Dog Woman and Jordan respectively. The images help alert the readers that there will be a shift in narrative voice and they should prepare to read the passages from the perspective of that particular character. When the story reaches the contemporary setting, Winterson presents the voices of modern Jordan and Dog Woman with a split banana and pineapple. So the split signals the transformation of time, and her fictional imagination goes beyond the level of words. The split images also lead the readers to think whether there is connection between the deformed food with the deformed narrative or characters. Brevity and concision should be the right words to describe Winterson's writing style. She aims at presenting the deepest thoughts with the simplest words, which is why she is canonical author in contemporary British, or maybe World, literature. Different from any realist novels in the Victorian period whose authors tell as much as they can for fear that they may miss any uninteresting details, Winterson tells as less as she can. When she is not telling all what she wants to say ...the words leave space for the readers to think. Though it is demanding to read to Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, it is absolutely pleasurable as nothing is the truth in her book. Winterson is a bohemian going against convention in Sexing the Cherry. Apart from the heterosexual norm I have mentioned, she also challenges other conventions, like truth and lies, and also the idea of time and space. "Time has no meaning, and space and place have no meaning". This quote from the novel may self-explain why the story is not fixedly set at a time and why the author brings back Greek homosexual mythologies to her narrative with Britain as the setting. Winterson is also troubling what are truth and time. She denies all the institutionalized concepts in our minds. The narrator puts a list of lies in the novel, renouncing that, for example, "time is a straight line" and that "we can only be in one place at a time". These denials fit the style of the novel, which is a fantasy across different times and spaces. Winterson rejects all the preoccupied conventions and addresses them directly to the audiences. ... with her power of imagination and might of words on paper and give readers an incredible contemporary masterpiece.Jeanette Winterson is the queen of fantasy and imagination. She links the impossible together and makes them possible in her books. She rejects the right and makes them seem wrong that demands a second of consideration before taking them for granted. Sexing the Cherry is a must to read and should be listed as an important text in contemporary lesbian or fantasy fiction.
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