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From Andrea Levy, author of Small Island and winner of the Best of the Best Orange Prize, comes a story of one woman and two islands
Levy’s previous novel, “Small Island,” examined the lives of Jamaican immigrants in Britain in the nineteen-forties. Here she depicts the next generation: the London-born children, circa 1970, who grapple with the knowledge that they are often still considered outsiders. Faith, working as a dresser for children’s television, is a somewhat heedless young woman whose assumption that she lives in a color-blind world is quickly demolished. At work, she finds that the only actors she’s allowed to touch are dolls; soon afterward, she helps a black woman who has been attacked by three youths. Her concerned parents send her to Jamaica, where she slowly recovers a sense of balance and uncovers her family’s past. Faith’s initial obliviousness to prejudice makes the first half of the book feel implausible; but, once the narrative moves to Jamaica, Levy’s remarkable ability to weave a complex, engrossing family history takes over.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Olver Capponcelli
reviewed Fruit of the Lemon on April 14, 2012
Fruit of the Lemon
I see this was Levy's first book, which certainly explains the disappointment I have with it as well as the pleasure I took in the descriptions and the fluid writing style.
It took awhile to get into the story. I liked it best when Faith starts narrating how she relates to her brother, Carl. I liked the moments when she noticed that even her best friend's family see her as different, her visit to Simon's parents home, the realisation that she is THE token black dresser at her workplace.
You can see her confusion and her lack of belonging by the time you get to the chapter where racist idiots ransack and attack a bookshop and the owner.
So then - only then - do the parents finally send her to Jamaica.
Which is good to begin with, I enjoyed the stories, the scenes of everyday life there, but then Faith kind of gets lost under all that telling.
Spoiler alert here:
Finally there is the story (told by Victor, her cousin in Jamaica) about how Faith's parents rang and begged Aunty Coral to host Faith because she seems lost. She hangs out with white people, she's living with men and a girl with loose morals, she has lost jobs, got above her station, never cared about her roots.
What?
I got that Faith wanted to know about her family tree and would ask, but her parents constantly evaded questions about anything. She doesn't seem close to her father and even says she had never been alone with him until he visits her flat and dislikes it.
She has a degree (how is this "above her station"?) and goes flatting, which is normal considering the parents brought her up as English and not Jamaican.
So why do they basically betray her like that?
Or perhaps it's in keeping with the family history, sisters arguing, mother's beating their own daughters but loving the whitest (sometimes adopted) kid in the family etc. To me it reads as if the kids that were valued were the ones that were most like Faith - very English - or white. Which doesn't make any sense to me as Faith is meant to be finding pride in being a Jamaican.
The end, the return to the UK, was just a splutter. Why bother with it?
So worth a read? Yes, it's an interesting perspective, but don't expect to understand Faith at the end of it.
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