I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review.
“It began many years ago, in the first love of shadows. The first knowing of the body’s dark, the curve around its shape holding darkness,” (Jopp 240).
Sonya Hudson’s life has been dominated by a severe phobia of cats since she was thirteen, seemingly out of nowhere. She doesn’t know what the cause could be. A visual artist, Sonya’s lived a comfortable life with her parents and younger sister Lois. True, her parents didn’t have a lot of money, and at times things could be tense with them, and the family moved a lot in Sonya’s youth, so what could be causing Sonya’s fear?
I really wanted to like this book more. From the Longing Orchard is a coming-of-age story that looks at mental illness and queerness in a time when both weren’t really discussed. At times the prose is beautifully written, Jopp writes with a lot of detail that perfectly paints the picture of the story she’s telling and puts reader’s right in the room with Sonya, but at other times the writing comes off a bit purple, and when those purple moments come it completely threw me out of the story. There’s also a plot point that is mentioned prominently in the beginning of the novel about the death of a young boy that gets seemingly forgotten about until the end. I understood the significance of this passage and why it was mentioned, but the story about the boy almost seemed like a separate story on it’s own. It clearly juxtaposed Sonya’s life, but really didn’t add much to her story.
In an interview with Deborah Kalb, Jopp reveals that From the Longing Orchard is chiefly about internalized homophobia. I picked up on Sonya’s queerness early on, and I can understand how her phobia of cats manifests in the characters psyche as a fear towards her own queerness, but I had trouble understanding why Sonya suffered from this internalized homophobia. Sonya’s upbringing throughout the book is unlike her classmates. Her family is vegetarian, doesn’t own a TV, are (in today’s terms) woke about the injustices around them (in the case of the book, the Vietnam War), Sonya’s parents end up divorcing (which is a shockingly small part of the book, considering the 70s setting of the book where divorce wasn’t common, none of Sonya’s friends seem to care that her parents are divorced which seemed strange to me), and Sonya’s mother is incredibly understanding and accepting of Sonya’s sexuality. So I had a hard time understanding how this fear could manifest within Sonya when her family was already unconventional, but I’m also not queer. I don’t know anything about what it’s like to have internalized homophobia, and I can recognize that I’m not necessarily the right audience for this book but that someone is. There are reader’s who will relate to Sonya and understand her story much clearer than I could.
There is a lot to love in From the Longing Orchard, it’s a novel that I know a lot of reader’s will love and be able to relate too, but I just wasn’t that reader. Reader’s who like contemporary coming-of-age stories that really put the reader into the story with it’s characters will love this one!
Publication: June 13th 2023
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Pages: 320 pages (Paperback ARC)
Source: TNBBC (Thanks Lori!)
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Coming of Age, Queer
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤
Summary:
Eighteen-year-old Sonya Hudson has been gripped by phobia since she was thirteen. What would make navigating the world so difficult for this budding visual artist? When the story opens, she lives with her mother and her sister in a suburb in New York in the late 1970s. The narrative carries us back through her childhood, where she struggles with the family’s frequent moving and with her parents’ increasingly fraught marriage. Lingering at the periphery of her consciousness is the shadow of a damaged boy she knew when she was very young. Reverence for the natural world provides comfort, as does her fierce attachment to her sister and her parents’ poignant guidance. But it is the intimacy with another young woman that ultimately offers a path to healing. In language soaring with poetic incantation, From the Longing Orchard shows us the ways in which a young woman and those she loves all must contend with a longing of some kind and how they seek from each other, and sometimes find, the needed balm.
Sarah O'Connor 