Bitter Orange
“Bitter Orange” is a whimsical and eerie novel the characters are full, rich, broken, flawed and beautiful. Claire Fuller is the author of this outstanding book. If you love a good, thought-out, spectacular character-driven story, this is one for you. If you enjoy characters who are very fleshed-out, suspense, and quite gentle shocks, this is for you. This book is elegant, creepy, dark, and wonderful. Bitter Orange is an impressive novel. The writing is rich and pulls readers in with characters who are interesting and nuanced. While the bones of the story are familiar, an unreliable narrator who falls under the spell of a troubled couple, its plot twist and turns felt original. Fuller is a riveting writer of dialogue and scenes, all the artistry in the marks upon the page after page, wielding a pen across the pages in an expense of her boundless imagination that seems wholly realistic and ingeniously creative, producing aesthetically sensuous ambiance of the story, as if she was painting a Renaissance triptych featuring three naked adults making furiously passionate love in an Arcadian English garden tinged with citrus scent of oranges, which likewise symbolize lust, desire, and passion, all denied to Frances in reality. And it is in this subtle respect of Frances’s smoldering indignation at such cruel denial of her yearnings only natural to any woman young and old, pretty and not so pretty, smart and not so smart that Fuller’s vivid imaginativeness and keen observation of psyche of characters manifest to the fullest extent and hold the reader undivided attention throughout the book with gusto and pleasure that will make you become titillating insatiable as you go deeper into this riveting story. Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller is delicious. A tale that draws the reader across the shaky ground to the final twists at the end of the book. Frances Jellico is reaching middle age in 1969, having just lost her mother. She accepts a position living in a crumbling English mansion and cataloging the architecture on the estate for the new owner, who lives abroad. Frances appears to be a naive, sheltered woman who is a bundle of Victorian sexual repression. She is a bit dowdy and overweight and has never had a boyfriend or even a friend so she is shocked and enchanted when she finds Cara and Peter on the estate. Peter has also been hired to inventory the furnishings and artwork that are left on the estate and Cara is his mentally fragile wife. While Peter and Cara are much younger than Frances, they insist that Frances take meals with them and spend days and evenings with them. Frances is giddy with the attention so she ignores the building contradictions in the stories Cara tells her about herself and Peter. The story is told from Frances’ point of view and shifts between present-day and 1969 but the writer is skillful and it isn’t difficult to follow. This is a deliciously dark tale.