Bad Fruit - Ella King - ★★

AUTHOR: Ella King

GENRE: Contemporary Literary Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: August 23, 2022

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary literary fiction portraying a highly toxic mother-daughter relationship. Character-oriented. Dark and disturbing. Plenty of triggers. Too much of deliberate secret-keeping and miscommunication, which sullies the overall impact. Might be a decent one-time read, as long as you aren’t looking for characters with redeeming qualities. But to me (and to my present state of mind), this felt like trauma p0rn.

Plot Preview:

Greenwich, UK. Seventeen-year-old Lily has just graduated from high school and waiting to start college at Oxford. She is constantly on tenterhooks around her volatile Singaporean mother May, As her British father Charlie also can't keep his wife’s temper in check, it is up to Lily to handle May’s devious tantrums as the only other resident of the house, her elder siblings already having moved out. As May’s behaviour grows increasingly demented, Lily starts getting weird visions where she sees events she knows aren’t from her own life. But these visions reveal some horrifying secrets connected to her own family. Will these visions help Lily finally understand May’s erratic behaviour? Can she hope for normalcy and perhaps even freedom?

The story comes to us in Lily’s first-person perspective.

While I can handle books with toxic parents and intergenerational trauma, I like such books only if the characters show some growth along the way. Sadly, in this novel, most of the plot seems like a rehash of the same emotions, with no character showing any interest in changing their attitude. This might have been tolerable in case of likeable or relatable characters. But given how we are dealing with a dad who is mostly spineless and selfish, a mother who is the most toxic mother I have yet read in fiction, a teen who fends for herself by caving in instead of standing up for her rights, and her elder siblings who are dependent and broken even in their independent lives, the story test our patience in every way.

Initially, I felt sympathy for some of the characters. But once I realised that the characters simply didn’t learn from their mistakes and kept doing the same thing over and over, the well of my sympathy ran dry. It would have helped to have at least one *normal* character in this family. But everyone is complicated in a bad way. As the proverb says, ‘one rotten apple spoils the rest’. In this case, the whole family is rotten, justifying the title perfectly.

To add to the issue, each of them keeps loads of secrets, tells plenty of lies, and is a master at miscommunication and misleading. This makes the proceedings even more annoying and tiresome. Having one character acting this way is still understandable. But when every character behaves this way with the rest, the writing feels toxic just for the sake of being toxic.

I wish there had been better character development at least for Charlie. We see why Lily’s mom behaves the way she days, and we also understand that Lily’s lifetime of growing with a manipulative parent has affected her thinking. The latter cause-effect also applies to her siblings. But why is Charlie like that? How is an educated professional not able to see the harm his wife is doing to his own children? Having some nuances to his character might have provided us with some justification for his silence and tacit compliance. The worst is what he does to Lily in the final quarter of the book. This is such a horrifying and gratuitous development that there was no saving the book after that point for me. Given the author’s professional background, I can only hope against hope that this particular scene isn't based on something she actually came across during her work.

May’s Singaporean background and her annoyance with Lily’s not resembling her is woven well into the plot, but there’s nothing much positive about the Asian representation except perhaps for the food. In many ways, May is the epitome of the Asian “tiger mom”, which is why I wish she had belong to any non-Asian ethnicity. Such writing just perpetuates the negative stereotypes of Asian parenting.

There are a couple of secondary characters who feel like a breath of fresh air amid all this toxicity, but their roles are very limited. They pop up only when Lily needs some external support. As such, the balance is missing in the book, with the emotions heavily lopsided towards the trauma side of the scale. The story aims to make us feel sorry for Lily and May, but I simply couldn’t feel sorry for the latter.

Lily’s visions are an unusual addition to the storyline. I found it strange that the first conclusion Lily drew on experiencing the vision is that she was having a flashback of someone else’s memories – that’s not where my head would have gone at the start. Anyway, these visions initially seem interesting, but soon become an overly convenient plot device to add a backstory to certain events.

The book shows the damages of long-term abuse and how it chips away at a person’s self-esteem. The writing is good, even poetic at times. The ending too might make many readers happy. But to me, it felt too chirpy after such a traumatic and depressing narrative.

Overall, this debut does impress in how it explore the darkest aspects of human behaviour. But mere dark without light never works for me. If the plot development hadn’t been so convenient and overly toxic, I might have liked this book more.

Recommended to lit fic readers who prefer dark/disturbing character-oriented reads.

My thanks to Harper Collins UK and Harper Fiction for providing the DRC of “Bad Fruit” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.