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A review by ivyninareads
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
2.0
I've got absolutely no idea how to rate this book or what to rate it. So I guess I won't. Scratch that, yes I will, but I literally have no way to explain how I came to my rating.
For it's themes, I want to give this book a horrid rating. The experiences of the half-formed girl are violent and utterly disturbing. There were too many sections of this novel where I felt physically sick to the stomach. I knew that there would be severe themes going into this book, but they were really just so vile. There were times where I was too uncomfortable and sickened to pick the book back up again. I think reading that kind of thing can be very hard for a lot of people, and for me personally those kinds of themes I have realised, are just not something I want to read about.
However, the final part of the book titled 'The Stolen Child' was doing a lot of interesting things with pacing and language. The short choppy sentences throughout the novel were really something to get used to but also necessary to this story I felt, and they were used really artfully in the final fifty pages or so of the novel. This style of writing felt very akin to prose poetry and there were elements of it that were less severe that I enjoyed quite a lot. The ending of the novel despite being horrific, was quite masterful in its writing to me.
I don't know what to say. I feel sick. I think that might have been the author's intention, but to a degree that makes me even more sick. I don't think I'll be picking up anything similar to this novel for a very long time.
For it's themes, I want to give this book a horrid rating. The experiences of the half-formed girl are violent and utterly disturbing. There were too many sections of this novel where I felt physically sick to the stomach. I knew that there would be severe themes going into this book, but they were really just so vile. There were times where I was too uncomfortable and sickened to pick the book back up again. I think reading that kind of thing can be very hard for a lot of people, and for me personally those kinds of themes I have realised, are just not something I want to read about.
However, the final part of the book titled 'The Stolen Child' was doing a lot of interesting things with pacing and language. The short choppy sentences throughout the novel were really something to get used to but also necessary to this story I felt, and they were used really artfully in the final fifty pages or so of the novel. This style of writing felt very akin to prose poetry and there were elements of it that were less severe that I enjoyed quite a lot. The ending of the novel despite being horrific, was quite masterful in its writing to me.
I don't know what to say. I feel sick. I think that might have been the author's intention, but to a degree that makes me even more sick. I don't think I'll be picking up anything similar to this novel for a very long time.