{"id":2070,"date":"2022-04-21T16:31:53","date_gmt":"2022-04-21T16:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2070"},"modified":"2023-04-02T23:01:55","modified_gmt":"2023-04-02T23:01:55","slug":"bad-fruit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2070","title":{"rendered":"Bad Fruit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lily lives in Greenwich, England with her Singaporean mother and white English father, but really she lives entirely in a world of her mother\u2019s creation and control. The teen must wear only pink sweaters to please mama, and she even dyes her hair black, wears colored contact lenses, and uses makeup to look more Chinese instead of the ang moh gui, or white devil, her mother accuses her of being. She\u2019s also forced to taste-test spoiled orange juice to make sure it\u2019s just the right level of rancid that mama enjoys, a bizarre task that will be readers\u2019 first signal that something is seriously off here. The emotionally and sometimes physically abused teen is about to get out as she\u2019s been accepted at Oxford University to study law\u2014guess who chose that\u2014but her subconscious seems to have other plans. What at first look like panic attacks turn out to be flashbacks to traumatic events\u2014but ones that happened to mama. How Lily can have memories of her mother\u2019s past, what made mama this way, and whether Lily can ever thwart her nightmare mother and useless father are puzzles that will keep readers rapt right till the end of Singaporean author King\u2019s dark exploration of \u201cthe terrible economics of responsibility and blame.\u201d <strong>This is one case in which the characters don\u2019t have to be likable for the book to be brilliant.<\/strong> From the awful-mother-tiptoeing-daughter dynamic to weirdness with oranges, <em>Bad Fruit<\/em> is a perfect readalike for Joanne Harris\u2019s <em>Five Quarters of the Orange<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lily lives in Greenwich, England with her Singaporean mother and white English father, but really she lives entirely in a world of her mother\u2019s creation and control. The teen must&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[126,144,52,164,51],"class_list":["post-2070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-cultural-heritage","tag-own-voices","tag-psychological","tag-star","tag-thrillers"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Bad-Fruit-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Bad-Fruit.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}