A review by cseibs
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

1.0

The book's description speaks of a tale of a woman's relationship with her brother. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. The book is nothing about her brother or any relationship with him, but rather about how the narrator has appropriated her brother's disability and exploited it to explain away her life. The brother is the half-formed thing here because the author has given him no life of his own and has not imbued the narrator with any kind of empathetic awareness to view the brother as anything but a source of selfish pain. I hate to judge a book by the unlikability of a character, but the narrator was just so absurdly devoid of any awareness as to be sociopathic. The stream of consciousness style should have allowed for some sympathic thought to cross her addled mind but it didn't. Which just made the style tiresome. Really couldn't finish this one fast enough and be done with it.