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A review by booksandbread_
Milkman by Anna Burns
challenging
slow-paced
3.5
This book. Whoa.
I don’t even know where to begin except to say that I’ve never read anything quite like it.
Milkman is dense.
You can’t just pick it up for a few chapters before bed.
This book asks for your full presence.
Once I surrendered to its rhythm, I was able to enjoy it.
At first, I found the circuitous narration dizzying.
The narrator doesn’t name names, avoids the center of every story, and loops her way toward the truth like she’s afraid it might explode if touched directly. And that’s the point.
She’s living in a place where everything is political, where silence is suspicious, and where being a young woman with a book is somehow enough to start a rumor that destroys your life.
Set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland (though it never says so), Milkman doesn’t focus on bombs or bullets, it focuses on what it feels like to live inside fear.
Inside gossip.
Inside a community where even your mother can’t be trusted to believe your version of reality.
Oddly enough, the only thing I’ve ever read that felt even remotely similar in form was Don Quixote.
That same layered, surreal, slightly off-balance narrative style.
The way language itself becomes a maze.
It takes time to adjust, but once I did, I was in.
There’s dark humor here too.
Absurdity.
A narrator who is both wildly perceptive and deeply dissociated.
By the end, I felt like I had walked through a fog of trauma and come out the other side with something that looked, just barely, like liberation.
If you pick this up, give it time.
And consider a tandem read…the audio helped as I followed along.
You don’t read Milkman to escape the world.
You read it to understand what it means to be crushed by one and still not completely lose yourself.
I don’t even know where to begin except to say that I’ve never read anything quite like it.
Milkman is dense.
You can’t just pick it up for a few chapters before bed.
This book asks for your full presence.
Once I surrendered to its rhythm, I was able to enjoy it.
At first, I found the circuitous narration dizzying.
The narrator doesn’t name names, avoids the center of every story, and loops her way toward the truth like she’s afraid it might explode if touched directly. And that’s the point.
She’s living in a place where everything is political, where silence is suspicious, and where being a young woman with a book is somehow enough to start a rumor that destroys your life.
Set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland (though it never says so), Milkman doesn’t focus on bombs or bullets, it focuses on what it feels like to live inside fear.
Inside gossip.
Inside a community where even your mother can’t be trusted to believe your version of reality.
Oddly enough, the only thing I’ve ever read that felt even remotely similar in form was Don Quixote.
That same layered, surreal, slightly off-balance narrative style.
The way language itself becomes a maze.
It takes time to adjust, but once I did, I was in.
There’s dark humor here too.
Absurdity.
A narrator who is both wildly perceptive and deeply dissociated.
By the end, I felt like I had walked through a fog of trauma and come out the other side with something that looked, just barely, like liberation.
If you pick this up, give it time.
And consider a tandem read…the audio helped as I followed along.
You don’t read Milkman to escape the world.
You read it to understand what it means to be crushed by one and still not completely lose yourself.