A review by merle98
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

2.75

almost three stars I would say. I expected to love this more and I was a little disappointed. I really did enjoy learning about Evaristo's protagonists' life stories, and I appreciate that she treated them all with sympathy and dignity regardless of their worldviews and beliefs. But this book could not decide if it was a novel or a manifesto and in this case, those two together did not work for me: As much as I love a book that offers social and political criticism, I like to come to my own conclusions based on the text. I don't need the analysis spelt out for me and slapped in my face at every corner. I wish Evaristo would have let her character's experiences speak for themselves, I think that would have made for a subtle but powerful intersectional feminist critique. Instead, the gender studies lectures and feminist slogans thrown into the book seemed mostly jarring. Also, everyone born after 1990 is insufferable (though apart from the speaking in hashtags, I can definitely see some of me and my uni-friends in Yazz and her squad), and so is the only man who gets to have a part. I think this is a me-problem: I've read better novels and I've read better intersectional feminist manifestos.

I am glad I listened to this as an audiobook with a wonderful narrator because the lower-caps-no-punctuation writing style would have probably pissed me off a lot.