A review by ovenbird_reads
The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson

5.0

I just finished this a few hours ago and I already want to read it again. Jeanette Winterson is one of my favourite writers ever. When it comes to language use so lovely it hurts, she's the master. This novel reads like a prose poem and there are images in here that I want to go back to, in order to savour them, drink them in. Humans, doomed to repeat their destructive dance in many different times, on many different planets are described in this parable-like tale as creatures that cannot escape their own violent and environmentally catastrophic tendencies. Yet we are also creators of beauty that can make you weep--poetry, music, love that is completely unmoored from gender. Winterson explores what makes us human, what connects us, and what makes our frequently selfish and murderous lives worth living. One segment of this book is told by a baby, first unborn and then in its early days of life, describing its consuming love for the universe that is its mother. Abandoned by this same mother to an orphanage at just 28 days old the child grows into an adult who is forever searching for her lost parent, the one that is made of the very same stuff that she is. It was, perhaps, one of the most moving and terribly beautiful things I have ever read. I think I need to buy this book for my permanent collection. Wish I could give it more than five stars.

And as a PS. I desperately wish that I could get a group of people together to read this aloud. The intensity of the prose demands it!