Reviews

Something Beginning With by Sarah Salway

mawaridi's review

2.0

A short, fast and quirky read at less than 180 pages. All the cover copy on this one says it’s “charming” and “bright” and that the narrator Verity is “endearingly naive,” but I didn’t find Verity endearing at all. She’s certainly naive, but also childish, spiteful and sometimes so kooky it stops being funny and becomes mystifying. I agree the writing is witty, often insightful, occasionally cynically very funny. But there’s a feeling of nastiness underlying everything that left me feeling more sad than charmed. And not to be dramatic about a single paragraph of text but the entry on “Fat Women” was both bizarrely vicious and completely irrelevant to the rest of the book; it’s short but it stuck with me! The format of this is great, and it’s an experimental style handled well, which I admire. But I hated how I felt reading it, all the same.