Forbidden Fruit by Kerry Greenwood – 2010 Davitt Readers Choice Winner

Author: Kerry Greenwood
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781741759822
No of Pages: 312
Price: 22.99
Review By: Tanya King
Book Synopsis: Forbidden Fruit is the fifth in the Corinna Chapman series by Kerry Greenwood. Greenwood is a prodigious writer, best known for her Phryne Fisher novels. Forbidden Fruits’ Corinna is an ex-accountant who left her life of regular hours and tailored suits behind to run a small, successful bakery off Flinders Lane in Melbourne, Earthly Delights.

Those who know and love Greenwood’s novels, will relish the chance to return to Corinna’s cosy world of 4am starts, loyal apprentices and bakery staff, beautiful Israeli lovers and, of course, a multitude of pampered cats. Forbidden Fruit is set just prior to Christmas, a time of year Corinna abhors, and Greenwood deftly mixes pagan and Christian symbols, such as a pregnant teen runaway, star-crossed lovers, a rose muffin loving donkey, a religious cult, militant vegans and anarchistic freegans. Corinna’s lover, Daniel, is on the search for the two runaways, Manny and Brigid with Brigid heavily pregnant. Greenwood revisits areas she has delved into before, specifically, what some people will do when taking their beliefs to the fundamentalist and rigid extremes. In Forbidden Fruit, she explores this through the mental and physical suffering inflicted on Brigid and her younger sister by their family in the name of an extreme religious cult, and via the extreme and disturbing actions of an equally inflexible group of animal rights vegans.

Forbidden Fruitis an inviting, hot chocolate of a book with Greenwood’s well-loved eccentric band of characters. It is best savoured slowly, preferably with a glass of your favourite tipple and a preferred nibble or three.