What's in this book
- Rita Mae Brown's 1973 coming-of-age novel - Molly Bolt grows up queer and southern across the 1950s and 1960s
- Canonical contemporary queer American literary fiction; defined a generation of lesbian-fiction publishing
- 256 pages of patient first-person Molly narration across childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood
- Author also wrote the long-running Mrs. Murphy mystery series
- Brigid Lohrey audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet, Stone Butch Blues, and canonical contemporary queer American literary fiction
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
Rubyfruit Jungle is Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 debut novel and one of the genuine landmark American books of the 1970s, the kind whose influence is so well absorbed that newer readers can misread it as small. It is not small. Molly Bolt, the narrator, grows up adopted into a poor Florida family, knows she is queer in roughly third grade, and proceeds to refuse every social script handed to her by school, family, and college. The prose is plain and quick. The voice is the closest thing American literature has to a lesbian Holden Caulfield, except funnier and considerably less self-pitying.
Brown writes Molly’s sexuality matter-of-factly, which in 1973 was a structural risk: there is no closet drama, no plea for sympathy, no apology built into the sentences. Molly is good at school. She is good in bed. She is bad at hierarchy. She gets pushed out of NYU film school for being too out, hitchhikes across the country, and ends up working dead-end jobs while filming what amounts to a final-act statement of purpose. The episodic structure feels picaresque on purpose, like Huck Finn going through the post-Stonewall South.
Recommended for every reader of coming-of-age fiction, anyone teaching queer literature, and readers who want books like Rubyfruit Jungle in the lineage that runs from this novel through Stone Butch Blues, Eileen Myles, and Alison Bechdel. Five stars without qualification, and a book that still feels younger than its half-century in print.
Related reads
If you liked Rubyfruit Jungle
Alma Mater
by Rita Mae Brown
Alma Mater by Rita Mae Brown 2001 review. A coming-of-age novel set at a small Virginia women’s college about a senior who falls in love with her best friend during her last spring semester.
Venus Envy
by Rita Mae Brown
Venus Envy by Rita Mae Brown 1993 review. A Virginia gallery owner mistakenly told she has weeks to live writes the truth to every important person in her life. Then she does not die.
A Nose for Justice
by Rita Mae Brown
The first Mags Rogers/Mrs. Murphy crossover, by Rita Mae Brown. Cozy mystery with three animal POV characters and a Virginia setting Brown knows by heart.
The Sand Castle
by Rita Mae Brown
The Sand Castle by Rita Mae Brown 2008 review. A multigenerational Maryland family rents a beach cottage on Chincoteague for one last summer day before the matriarch dies.
More by this author