Jeanette Winterson's novel right from the title creates some curiosity into the reader's mind. Why they are not the only fruit? The reader doesn't know what to expect from the novel reading the title. Anyway such a title capture reader's attention and invites them to find it out.

Chapter 1

GENESIS:

The book of Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. It describes the beginnings of the world, man, and the tribes of Israel.

Likewise, Winterson's chapter also tells Jeanette's beginnings, describing her, her placement in the family and her life.

The opening paragraph:

It is very significant in order to understand the family characterisation. Jeanette's mother "like to wrestle" and she was "the white corner and that was that". She is a strange person and very obsessive whit religion.

Characterisation:

For Jeanette's mother, the world contains enemies ( the Devil, next door, sex, slugs) and friends (God, our dog, auntie Madge, the novels of Charlotte Bronte, slug pellets).

Jeanette's father is a very passive person and he is not considered important into the family, but bringing home money. In addition her mother "didn't believe there were any wise men", it underlines men's few importance.

Jeanette, the novel's narrator, retells her life from when she is seven years old to time after her teenage years. She is a devote child who believes in God and love. She grow up as a special person with one objective: to become a missionary, a servant of God. One day she felt in love with a girl and everything changed.

Back to the first chapter it tells about her family and her usual day-life. The novel then switches to a story about a beautiful princess who is so sensitive that the death of a moth could distress her for weeks. One day thanks an old hunchbacked woman she never thinks of her worries again, after accepting to milk the goats, to educate the people and to compose songs for their festivals. The short story is connect to the main story about Jeanette because Jeanette herself is calling to because a missionary. That means she will go somewhere to be a pastor (metaphor for goats) , to educate people and to compose songs to better improve Bible's themes. Then she switches back to her life and describes her adoption in more detail.

In all the book as in the first chapter, there were a lot of Biblical references:

The origins of Jeanette's adoption was that her mother didn't want to do children, so she wants to get one like Mary got, without a sexual relationship.

Another example is how her mother comes to the idea to adopt a child: she dreamed of it and sometime later she followed a star until she came to settle above an orphanage.

Chapter 2

EXODUS:

The book of Exodus contains the story of the flight of the people of Israel from Egypt. The Exodus chapter in the novel deals with similar themes. At school Jeanette becomes exposed to ideas that are not those of her mother's. The opening scene of this chapter shows that Jeanette may not always keep with her mother's ideas. Jeanette's deafness concerns one of the first phrases of her exodus.