Annabel by Kathleen Winter – review
This Orange shortlisted debut is poignant but not entirely plausible
Carrie O'Grady
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 April 2011 17.15 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/12/annabel-kathleen-winter-orange-review"Boy or girl?" It's the one question people feel safe asking a new mother, since it can hardly cause offence. But what if the answer isn't straightforward? Even today, in our supposedly broad-minded age, you'd feel a bombshell had been dropped if the proud parent were to reply simply: "Both."
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Kathleen Winter, a Canadian writer, has done well with her debut novel: it has made the Orange prize shortlist here as well as the shortlists for Canada's three biggest fiction awards. It didn't win those, but its delicate treatment of a sensitive subject charmed readers and judges alike. Not many authors have tackled issues of intersexuality or variations on what used to be called, in less tactful times, hermaphroditism. Annabel takes a fresh approach: it eschews the dark humour of Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, or, in less direct treatments, the gruesomeness of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory, the epic sweep of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the inventive intricacy of Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. This is a quiet, inward-looking treatment of a quiet, inward-looking person who is, in a way, more human than most, being man and woman in one, yet who feels completely alone in a small world.
