Bad Fruit by Ella King

 

Bad Fruit by Ella King.

Published 18th August 2022 by Harper Collins.

From the cover of the book:

Every family has it's secrets...

LILY IS A GOOD DAUGHTER

Every evening she pours Mama a glass of perfectly spoilt orange juice. She arranges the teddy bears on Mama’s quilt, she puts on her matching pink clothes. Anything to help put out the fire of Mama’s rage.

MAMA IS A GOOD LIAR

But Mama is becoming unpredictable, dangerous. And as she starts to unravel, so do the memories that Lily has kept locked away for so long.
She only wanted to be good, to help piece Mama back together. But as home truths creep out of the shadows, Lily must recast everything: what if her house isn’t a home – but a prison? What if Mama isn’t a protector – but a monster . . .

***********

Lily tries to be a good daughter, and as the youngest child she has taken on the role of the one who keeps her mother's wildly swinging moods under control. While her older sister and brother, and even father, seem to provoke Mama's rage, Lily spends her time smothering who she really is to be a mirror image of her mother, and the picture of obedience. All must be right for the sake of peace, down to the perfectly spoilt orange juice Mama prefers, and the 'just-so' placement of the many teddies on Mama's quilt.

As the time approaches for Lily to leave home and take up her studies at Oxford, Mama is becoming increasingly more unpredictable and violent. Mama's desire to control every little detail of her family's lives is having even more of an effect on them all than ever before. As Mama unravels, the behaviour Lily has adopted to cope with the secrets that must be hidden from outside eyes is no longer enough to keep her on an even keel, and she finds herself overwhelmed with flashbacks that make her question whether all the things Mama has claimed about her past are in fact true. Is her home something other than a haven, and is her mother actually a monster?

I do love a story of a dysfunctional family, and this is one of the best I have read in a good long time. Ella King draws you in right from the beginning with Mama's strange behaviour and the weird controlling relationship she has with everyone in her family, especially her youngest child Lily. It becomes impossible to look away even for a second as everything gets darker and more disturbing as Lily's flashbacks allow you to put all the little pieces together about what lies at the heart of Mama's broken psyche, and you begin to see who is complicit in preserving the wrongness of this status quo.

King does a splendid job of subtly altering your perspective on the characters as the story develops and Mama's fiction about her own childhood in Singapore is brought into shocking focus. Mama is certainly a very unpleasant character, but no one really comes out of this well when it comes to how Lily has taken the brunt of making their lives better, which is particularly painful to read. The tension builds to epic proportions as you long for Lily to break free of the poisonous atmosphere of her home life, and King keeps you teetering on the very edge with twist and twist again moments that make it impossible to see what the resolution will be right up to the time when the full truth of Mama's cruelty is exposed. 

I was very impressed with the way King has you questioning the motives of every person in this family, even Mama herself, and throws you a thought provoking curve ball that explores whether understanding the acts that have shaped a person can ever forgive the depravity of the behaviour they inflict upon the innocent, and if those who are complicit share equal guilt. She also deftly portrays what can happen when dysfunction is allowed to roll over from generation to generation, and offers a masterclass in how a theme can be used to great effect in many aspects of a story in the way she uses the notion of spoiled goods.

This is a cracking debut, beautifully conceived and sharply written. If horrendous families are your thing then this is a book that needs to be right at the top your reading pile - although you might need a lie down in a darkened room at the end. I loved it! 

Bad Fruit is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Harper Collins for sending me a hardcover copy of this book in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Ella King is a British-Singaporean novelist, an award-winning writer (3rd in the Aurora Prize for Short Fiction 2019 and winner of the Blue Pencil Pitch Prize 2019), and a graduate of Faber Academy’s novel-writing program. She has worked as a corporate lawyer and for anti-human trafficking and domestic violence charities.

Ella lives in Greenwich, UK with her husband, two daughters and a ginger Siberian cat and is currently working on my second novel.