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A review by secre
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
Part of my mediocre rating for this is down to the formatting and style, and I fully recognise that may be a me problem. Hence why it's a three star rating and not any lower, because the bones behind the stylistic choices are good. I just struggled to engage with them as well I perhaps could have.
My main issue is the narrative structure, where the over-arching narrative is told through a series of shorts, skipping between characters and almost always introducing new characters, many of whom have tenuous links to previously referenced ones. They weren't necessarily chronological, so you'd have to place yourself in time as well as place. Every single skip, I had to force myself to mind plot who this person was in relation to everyone else - or at least somebody else. Every single skip, I had to re-orientate myself and that was exhausting to read. There were so many characters and many of them introduced by different names depending on who was talking that keeping the mental mind map made it a tedious exercise. My second issue was the formatting choice. Almost like poetry, but not poetry. Lines of text with no capitalisation or punctuation. Maybe I'm just a conservative reader, but I struggled to engage.
Each of the twelve chapters takes on a different perspective, all showing a variety of women, mostly black and British but from a variety of backgrounds, as they find their place in the world. There's a complete range of characters here and I did find that Evaristo captured the different voices well. There were some odd choices like a mother wanting to caress her daughter's partners balls almost the first time she meets him, but I suppose there's all sorts out there. Evaristo captures different time periods and scenes; from the elderly farming couple to the distinctly promiscuous lesbian scene. The links between characters can be overt or tenuous, which can make it difficult to track where the link is though.
It's got good bones to it, but the use of so many inter-linked characters let it down for me. It would have been better had Evaristo focussed more closely on three or four of the characters, using the others within their chapters rather than set on their own. It needed more meat on the bones to really work for me and it couldn't do that when it was skipping between so many different elements, particularly when some of them were so loosely connected. There were some characters I actively connected with, others I didn't and others I found myself mildly grossed out by; I'll reference back to the balls reference earlier. All in all, an interesting piece, but not one for me.
My main issue is the narrative structure, where the over-arching narrative is told through a series of shorts, skipping between characters and almost always introducing new characters, many of whom have tenuous links to previously referenced ones. They weren't necessarily chronological, so you'd have to place yourself in time as well as place. Every single skip, I had to force myself to mind plot who this person was in relation to everyone else - or at least somebody else. Every single skip, I had to re-orientate myself and that was exhausting to read. There were so many characters and many of them introduced by different names depending on who was talking that keeping the mental mind map made it a tedious exercise. My second issue was the formatting choice. Almost like poetry, but not poetry. Lines of text with no capitalisation or punctuation. Maybe I'm just a conservative reader, but I struggled to engage.
Each of the twelve chapters takes on a different perspective, all showing a variety of women, mostly black and British but from a variety of backgrounds, as they find their place in the world. There's a complete range of characters here and I did find that Evaristo captured the different voices well. There were some odd choices like a mother wanting to caress her daughter's partners balls almost the first time she meets him, but I suppose there's all sorts out there. Evaristo captures different time periods and scenes; from the elderly farming couple to the distinctly promiscuous lesbian scene. The links between characters can be overt or tenuous, which can make it difficult to track where the link is though.
It's got good bones to it, but the use of so many inter-linked characters let it down for me. It would have been better had Evaristo focussed more closely on three or four of the characters, using the others within their chapters rather than set on their own. It needed more meat on the bones to really work for me and it couldn't do that when it was skipping between so many different elements, particularly when some of them were so loosely connected. There were some characters I actively connected with, others I didn't and others I found myself mildly grossed out by; I'll reference back to the balls reference earlier. All in all, an interesting piece, but not one for me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism and Domestic abuse
Moderate: Rape