Bad Fruit

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Bad Fruit is a beautiful collision of mothers and daughters, human darkness and human kindness, truth and lies, remembering and forgetting, trauma and healing.” With shades of Mommy Dearest, the hangers stay in the closet, but words and manipulation are wielded to maximum effect with disturbing results. I was in turn unsettled, angry, and hopeful with other emotions in between. The dysfunctional (and abusive) relationship between Lily and her mother is the focus, but the rest of her family doesn’t fare well either. In addition, other hidden issues surface during the course of the story. The story is dense but not completely dark. It’s lightened by Lily’s engaging character and the author’s unique writing style. It was a pleasure to read fresh and sophisticated wording and my literary appreciation was balanced with the weighty subject matter. IF YOU HAVE A DIFFICULT RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR MOTHER OR FATHER OR BOTH, CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED. If you don't have the coping mechanisms to deal with being #triggered by family abuse, don't self-harm by forcing yourself to read this. Mental health >>>>>>

While I know this isn't the most glowing review I will say that Ella King has tremendous talent and a very bright future ahead of her and I very much look forward to see what she comes up with next. 3 stars!Debut author King skillfully brings to light the layered, deeply complex machinations that lurk below the surface in families and confer the fragile impression of normalcy; this family’s crosshairs of obligation, love, and resentment, too, are never oversimplified. May is especially captivating: a veritable tyrant who’s also full of sympathetic, deeply human insecurities. […] Layered, variable, and, like spoiled orange juice, sometimes complicatedly bitter.” In her debut novel, King brilliantly portrays generational abuse and trauma passed down from parent to child and a resulting, conscious fight to break free from the toxic cycle. She writes with mastery as she explores the disturbing effects of childhood trauma within a biracial family. Thrilling and suspenseful, King’s exemplary novel will keep readers fascinated until the end.” I don't know, I just feel like I should have felt something tugging at my heartstrings and I didn't. I just could not get immersed in this story no matter how sharp the actual writing was. I know her mother experienced horrific abuse but I'm not a believer in that being any justification for abusing her own children but I say that as someone who grew up with loving and supporting parents. What do I know? On this subject, thankfully, very little. Helena Lee, editor of East Side Voices: Essays Celebrating East & Southeast Asian Identity in Britain

Another really engaging thread to this book is Lily’s interest in etymology. As a parallel to exploring her own roots, Lily’s love of the origin of language is woven throughout by giving us lovely descriptions like this: 'The Latin root for ‘hallucinate’ is irresistibly beautiful, alucinari, something you would name a Victorian child.'King delves into toxic family ties and intergenerational trauma in her hypnotic debut …[A] perfect blendof psychological thriller and coming-of-age. This author is off to a great start.”

Bad Fruit is brilliant, taut and explosive. Ella King deftly explores the toxicity of generational trauma while being unafraid to confront the racial tensions that can simmer below the surface. A bold new voice.” The story also sees Lily develop a friendship with an older man, Lewis, who lives near her. On paper, this is the dangerous relationship but Ella King subverts what is expected when it comes this, heightening the impact of Lily’s relationships with her family. It's genuinely taken the breath out of me, this book - I love it, but I'm definitely going to need some recovery time after the gutpunches in that ending. The conceit is so smart, taking generational trauma and making it literal, and the way the author writes characters you'll care about and then shows you the full extent of their trauma - brutal even as a reader who knows it's fiction, but that's the genius of the writing. Ella King opens up the fraught space between mother and daughter to reveal both the unbearable weight of inherited traumas as well as the uncontainable desire of a heart reaching for life. Bad Fruit cuts away the skin of a family as if a daughter could be a knife slicing through lies, pain, and fear. The heart hidden beneath all the secrets is sweet. The heart hidden beneath the secrets is hers. Breathtaking.”

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OOHHWEEE my therapist is gonna get an earful when I see her next. I don't want to reveal too much about my family life—I mean I'm wearing a ski mask in my profile pic so that should give you an idea of my desire to be incognito—but this particular story was difficile to get through.