I wanted to love this book. As an English graduate with a vested interest in queer literature and theory, I should have loved this book. And yet I didn't.

I think the main issue I had with it was the pacing. The first 3/4 of the book are set in Jeanette's childhood, and these chapters are fantastic. Beautifully written and insightful, Winterson manages beyond expectation to capture the voice of a child. These chapters are at once heartbreaking and amusing, with dry wit peppered throughout the narrative.

It's the last 1/4 of the book that lets it down. Within the space of a mere 50 or so pages, Jeanette grows up. She leaves home. She moves away. She does... something. It's hard to say what; we only ever hear that she lived a life in 'the city', away from everything she knew in the village in which she grew up. Throughout this section of the book, Winterson draws parallels with the life of her protagonist and various fairystories. We hear about Winnet, a young girl who was forced to abandon everything she knew back home, and eventually forgot who she was, retaining only a sense of loss. We hear about Sir Percival, who almost wasted away in search of the Grail. These stories, interwoven as they are with the main body of the narrative, are clearly supposed to be telling. We are supposed to associate these interlinking tales with Jeanette's own journey. The problem is that we don't know enough about Jeanette's story in this section for these separate narratives to have any weight or meaning in relation to it. OK, so by the tale of Winnet, we know that Jeanette herself changed beyond recognition when in the city, yet never stopped missing home. It would be nice, however, if we could hear this from Jeanette herself. It really depersonalised the text for me, these methods of telling Jeanette's story through the mouths of myths, and it didn't quite work as I think Winterson intended.

Honestly, it feels as though Winterson wrote the first 3/4 of the book and then realised that she was running out of room to tell the rest of her story, and so tacked it onto the end in the form of borrowed narratives. It made for a pretty story - the fables of Winnet and Percival are enjoyable, they're just not meaningful in context. It has the effect of seriously diminishing the end of the novel - because Jeanette returns home after many years away, but after only a few pages, it really doesn't seem like she's been away for a long time at all. It means that her ultimate epiphany is severely diminished into only a small realisation, and it lessens the impact of the first excellent 3/4. Were it not for the ending, this book would merit 4 stars, but I can't in good faith give it any more than 3 when I finished it feeling so disappointed.