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A review by valentinefleisch
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
5.0
I’m a sucker for this book. It’s cleverly structured around twelve characters—predominantly Black women—and an imminent event—namely, the opening of a play written and directed by one of these women. The characters are divided into groups of three, usually a mother, a daughter, and someone close to the two of them. Each character gets their own narrative, their own chance to explain their life and, so to speak, their side of the story, though usually these narratives have little plot outside the happenstances of life itself. Instead, the focus is on character exploration, how these people relate to themselves and each other. By the end, the characters are given a chance to converge around the central event, the play.
The style of this book is as playful as its structure. It’s something of a prose poem. Punctuation is sparing. Line breaks serve to emphasize a particularly affecting line by drawing it out so that three words turn into three punches to the face. Periods aren’t used until the ends of sections, as if capping off a long thought. You might also make the observation that this book is formatted not unlike a collection of interconnected short stories, so it’s straddling the line of several categorizations. It’s hard to put it in a simple, neatly labeled box.
Which leads me to the heart of the novel: Girl, Woman, Other is a master class in character development. If I was asked for my opinion on which book authors should consult for inspiration on character crafting, it would be this one. It allows you to see characters from multiple perspectives, including their own, so you have a rounded portrait, which makes the lives that it explores rather as ambiguous as the format of the book itself. I went from liking some characters in one chapter to feeling skeptical of them in the next. Alternatively, characters that were at first introduced as antagonists or annoyances were later fleshed out into individuals for whom I could feel empathy or pity or admiration.
Though this book primarily follows bi and lesbian Black women, I would also like to point out that there is a character that comes into their non-binary identity during the course of their story, and that representation meant a lot to me. The whole read was incredibly emotional, though it also took the proper moments to be funny or irreverent or even scandalous. (There’s a chapter with a mother lusting after her son-in-law that had me texting my friends in ALL CAPS.) The way that the characters intersect by the end, the way that their lives inform each other, I thought was brilliant. Even though this book follows so many people, it gives such perfect closure.
[If you like this, feel free to follow my reviews and find me discussing books on YouTube at my channel, Amanda Michele.]
The style of this book is as playful as its structure. It’s something of a prose poem. Punctuation is sparing. Line breaks serve to emphasize a particularly affecting line by drawing it out so that three words turn into three punches to the face. Periods aren’t used until the ends of sections, as if capping off a long thought. You might also make the observation that this book is formatted not unlike a collection of interconnected short stories, so it’s straddling the line of several categorizations. It’s hard to put it in a simple, neatly labeled box.
Which leads me to the heart of the novel: Girl, Woman, Other is a master class in character development. If I was asked for my opinion on which book authors should consult for inspiration on character crafting, it would be this one. It allows you to see characters from multiple perspectives, including their own, so you have a rounded portrait, which makes the lives that it explores rather as ambiguous as the format of the book itself. I went from liking some characters in one chapter to feeling skeptical of them in the next. Alternatively, characters that were at first introduced as antagonists or annoyances were later fleshed out into individuals for whom I could feel empathy or pity or admiration.
Though this book primarily follows bi and lesbian Black women, I would also like to point out that there is a character that comes into their non-binary identity during the course of their story, and that representation meant a lot to me. The whole read was incredibly emotional, though it also took the proper moments to be funny or irreverent or even scandalous. (There’s a chapter with a mother lusting after her son-in-law that had me texting my friends in ALL CAPS.) The way that the characters intersect by the end, the way that their lives inform each other, I thought was brilliant. Even though this book follows so many people, it gives such perfect closure.
[If you like this, feel free to follow my reviews and find me discussing books on YouTube at my channel, Amanda Michele.]