I have a goal to read more nonfiction this year and I was pleasantly surprised by Foreign Fruit. It was compulsively readable, impeccably reported narrative nonfiction in the style of Seabiscuit or Erik Larson. This book tackled ambitious, far-reaching themes but what brought it down to earth and made it unique was the connective tissue of the deeply personal memoir interspersed with social and cultural history, anthropology, and the ugly legacy of colonialism. It never felt like a lecture because it was interwoven with an intriguing personal story that made me feel emotionally connected to the orange on a personal level.

Katie Goh is a queer, Malaysian-Chinese-Irish journalist who is assigned a story to write about the murder of 11 Asian-Americans at a dance studio in 2023 at a time of rising hate against AAPI folks in the wake of the pandemic. She's asked to write about it from her personal perspective as an Asian-American. She turns down the assignment as she contemplates the violent deaths of six women while staring at five oranges in a bowl. Seeing connections, she turns instead to putting her thoughts in this book, a far-reaching history of the orange that was far more compelling and riveting than I had expected.

The author writes with that distinct journalistic style of objective, impersonal observation of events so I expected this to be a dry retelling of facts, and in parts it was that and could read like an encyclopedia entry as she recited historical accounts. But this narrative is anything but objective. Though the connections between her personal history were loose, this book really shone and read like a novel as Goh examines her inner conflict between standing between two worlds and not knowing which is home and in which place she is a tourist, what belonging means to someone whose identity is enmeshed in liminal spaces in all respects. Like the hybrid history of the orange, a foreign citrus brought to strange lands by colonizers, Goh too lives in the spaces in between cultures as she seeks to find herself and where her personal history fits.

I related to her experiences and emotional reaction to life under covid lockdown because that was my experience and anxieties as well.

For a book that focused such a large piece on the author's personal history, I had hoped for more illumination about her queerness and how that intersected with her cultural identity and her feeling of being trapped in liminal spaces. But it was barely a sentence or two. The author's personal memoir focused instead on her connections with her family and grandmothers, and her journey toward self-acceptance of her mixed-race ethnic identity as she learned about the history of Britain not taught in schools through the lens of the orange.

From California, to Malaysia, to China and the Silk Road, and back to Ireland, this book covered a wide range of topics. Almost too wide to touch deeply on any one of them. I appreciated how the author wove her doubt about her ability to pull it off in the narrative and this got me on her side. It worked best when interspersed with Goh's personal history and turning on its head the journalism faux pas of making yourself the subject of the story.

Because of this book I am now longing for the sweet dribble of fresh citrus, and I will also be thinking of the blood, history and pain that you don't see on the supermarket shelves when you reach for a rich globule of tempting orange fruit with a fascinating and disturbing history.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Beautifully written, "Foreign Fruit" shares the story of one woman's journey and is braided together with fruit. Katie Goh's story is heartfelt and raw, and reading it caused me to empathize, and think more about the bounty of fruit, and life, delicious and fleeting, that we sometimes take for granted. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. Pub Date: May 6, 2025.

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