Reviews

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

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dimminglight's review against another edition

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5.0

At first i was confused about the writing style but to me it read like poetry and simply touching.

kyrajade's review against another edition

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3.0

Appreciate how experimentative the form is but it's honestly pretty dull to read something so incomprehensible and my eyes just kept running over and not taking anything in. I also feel like you can't form a connection with a character who you can't understand. I didn't get her motives for anything, the story isn't fleshed out enough to properly portray her character development. Considering it's pretty much just a cluster of thoughts on every page I had no idea what she was thinking most of the time. Events which were supposed to be sad were kind of cheapened by the form and just passed by without much thought. I think my main problem is that if the form is supposed to represent the character's consciousness it should have become more legible as she got older and only descended into madness when her brother is diagnosed/passes. Realistically even when she is 13-16 it should have gained some consistent clarity. Also I mean people don't even really think in these kinds of thought patterns anyway. I think the plot is so interesting but I would have been more engaged if I actually could get to grips with what was going on and why the protag is acting this way.

fionac326's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

janetmf3's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

In scathing, furious, unforgettable prose, Eimear McBride tells the story of a young girl's devastating adolescence as she and her brother, who suffers from a brain tumor, struggle for a semblance of normalcy in the shadow of sexual abuse, denial, and chaos at home.
This stream of consciousness novel explores an Irish girl's relationship with her disabled brother, religious mother, and her own troubled sexuality.

McBride's experimental style "forgoes quotation marks and elides verbiage for sense, sound and sheer appearance on the page. For emphasis it occasionally wreaks havoc on capitals and reverses letter order."

'A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing' is an example of an author mirroring the style and structure of the story with the subject material of which it is concerned. McBride seems to have carefully considered even the decision of not naming her narrator
– a decision which further enforces her state of being half-formed, as the title suggests. The story’s unique prose and dual plot-line combine to create a suggested series of images that seems not so much an account, but a mental framework of the story’s protagonist.

I read this in college almost ten years ago and I always remember it having such a huge impact on me. I absolutely adored its dark, gripping themes and unusual writing style. Having listened to the audiobook now, it didn't have the same kind of impact, I'm not sure if that is because it has been so long since I last read it and I have romanticed the novel, or if it's because I listened to it this time when I read it the last time, but the story still had that kind of shocking impact because of the themes, images, characters etc.

I do think that this book won't be for everyone. Like many people hate how Sally Rooney doesn't use quotation marks, this is much worse, with using stream of consciousness, fragmented sentences. However, there is something about the way that it is written that leaves a bigger impact when discussing really dark themes. Everyone in the book is anonymised and even the location, apart from the obvious Irish background, is unknown. It's almost like anyone could read themselves into the story and become the narrator through the process.

The ending has stayed with me for the last 10 years and I have given this book to people in the past as gifts because of the mark it left on me when I first read it. I would love to physically read this book again, but Eimear McBride herself did a fantastic job of reading the audiobook. I don't think anyone else could have emphasised the power behind the message in this novel like she has.