A review by halliejgrant
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

informative reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

This work was ambitious in form and fairly well-executed. That said, after reflecting on this book more, I feel it excelled in some respects but significantly missed the mark in others. Hence my excessively long review.

To start with the positive, I unexpectedly loved the unstructured narrative format that didn’t adhere to conventional rules. This choice helped the author convey that we were reading the highly personal and unpolished internal monologue of each character, cutting through some of the constraints of correct grammar and punctuation to focus on the meaning and delivery of the story. It still flowed well and was rarely confusing or awkward. I am quite picky about the cadence and readability of prose, and the format in this compromised neither. The line breaks were sometimes a bit cringe, but overall I appreciated the intentional and unconventional structure choices. The unstructured format complemented the author’s matter-of-fact writing style, which was particularly effective in conveying the characters’ pain.

In most of the stories, the author did a great job of creating characters that subvert social expectations while still feeling very authentic in their identities. Many of the characters had beautiful, layered, and emotionally moving stories. Often characters of color and other marginalized identities are often made to bear the burden of representing their entire identity, and Evaristo mostly avoided doing that. 

The strongest part of this book was its illustration of the complexity of identity and relationships. This was particularly well done with intergenerational immigrant relationships, usually mother-daughter. The unstructured narrative format facilitated the excellent descriptions of confrontation between characters, maintaining its suspense and meaning but removing the wordy back-and-forth she-said of typical dialogue. The conflicting and complementary nature of identity was also explored very well in this book. One character navigates her conflict between identifying as Black and British and/or Black and Nigerian and the pressure to minimize both to assimilate with whiteness. Importantly, the author depicted injustices and hardships while still making sure the characters were much more than the bad things that happened to them. All-in-all, this book did a great job of putting the reader in the shoes of people whose identities brought them experiences the reader may never have.

Unfortunately, these compelling themes didn’t have the opportunity to be explored in as much depth as they could have been. The cast of twelve main characters all varied across generations, time period, class, immigrant experience, sexuality, and even gender and race. I understand the author wanted to cover a wide range of stories, but I think the book might have been trying to do too much. At some point the author sacrificed depth for breadth, and it started to feel a bit like characters had been added to check boxes rather than substantively add to the story.

Frankly, several of the characters were forgettable. Not all of them had very distinct narrative voices, which I think is essential to making this format shine. There were a few characters that did stand out, though, and I found myself wanting to stay with their stories and learn more about them rather than move on to the next (and next and next) character. I’m sure there are those for whom the character vignette format worked in this book, but I don’t think I was one of them.

In particular, I think the characters from Chapter 4 should have been explored in a different book. Their connection to the other characters in this book—socially, thematically, and temporally—was very tenuous, and they weren’t developed enough to be particularly compelling. In my opinion, the page space could have more effectively utilized by further exploring the stories of the other characters. Alternatively, the characters in question could have been given more depth and connections with the other characters to make them feel more consistent with the rest of the stories. As is, I think they weakened the book as a whole. It was clear the author’s objective in this work was to convey the breadth of experiences of (mostly) Black (mostly) women in Britain, so I understand the choice to include these stories, but I wish it had been done more effectively.

Compared to the authenticity and compelling stories of the other characters, Gen Z-age characters felt like caricatures of young people based on the sort of criticisms deployed by right-wing media. One is an exaggeratedly self-righteous, incredibly annoying person who exploits her godparents for money, and the other is a non-binary influencer who overcame a serious drug addiction as a teenager with just a few days of shaky hands after stopping cold turkey then went about their life. Their characters felt very shallow, with their conversations and internal monologues reading like they were directly pulled from Twitter or TikTok (but often simultaneously feeling quite outdated). While the internet is of course a component of Gen Z culture, it’s by no means the extent of their (our) thoughts, feelings, and internal lives. The two young characters are depicted as unrealistically shallow and largely hardship-free, which feels rather reductive and struck me as odd in relation to the other characters. Also, I promise that no one thinks in hashtags!!! 

Similarly odd was the choice to conclude the book with the story that was used for the epilogue, which frankly undermined the overall message of the book. It ended on a “race doesn’t matter, we’re all human” note, which is the antithesis of the message in most of the book since the characters’ experiences are in fact highly racialized. In my opinion, closing with the current Chapter 5 would have been an open-ended yet satisfying conclusion that stayed true to the overall themes of the book.

All that said, I do think that a good half of this book was beautifully done, and I’m very glad I read it for the stories that were compelling. All of the stories grappled with events and perspectives that I as a white person needed to read and learned a lot from. Because of a few structural and characterization decisions, though, I was left feeling like the book could have been better.