Girl, Woman, Other
Author: Bernadine Evaristo
Published by: Penguin
Pages: 455
Format: Paperback
My Rating ★★★★★
Published by: Penguin
Pages: 455
Format: Paperback
My Rating ★★★★★
This is Britain as you’ve never read it.
This is Britain as it has never been told.
From the top of the country to the bottom, across more than a century of change and growth and struggle and life, Girl, Woman, Other follows twelve very different characters on an entwined journey of discovery.
It is future, it is past. It is fiction, it is history.
It is a novel about who we are now.
This is Britain as it has never been told.
From the top of the country to the bottom, across more than a century of change and growth and struggle and life, Girl, Woman, Other follows twelve very different characters on an entwined journey of discovery.
It is future, it is past. It is fiction, it is history.
It is a novel about who we are now.
My thoughts:
Girl, Woman, Other follows twelve characters, most of them black British women, moving through the world in different decades and learning how to be. Each character has a chapter and within the chapters their lives overlap. It soon becomes clear that their experiences, backgrounds and choices could not be more different.
The characters are flawed and complex: for example Bummi, the immigrant parent who would rather her child did anything but bring home a white partner; and later, an affair that explores one of the worst ways one woman can betray another. When each section ends, we leave with a new perspective.
The book concludes with these various black women of different generations, faiths, classes, politics and heritages, and a few men too – thrown together at a party for a grand finale. This is an exciting contemporary novel of our times, and I sped through it in one sitting.
I absolutely loved the way this book was written as a mix of prose and poetry, stripped of punctuation. The lack of punctuation allowed for the words to flow in my mind in a different way than they would with punctuation. In my opinion, it added a lot and really helped to emphasise that this is an ongoing story: one woman's life rolling into the next, without end. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, and I can't remember the last time I read a book so fast!
Girl, Woman, Other is about struggle, but it is also about love, joy and imagination. A must read!
Overall reaction:
Girl, Woman, Other follows twelve characters, most of them black British women, moving through the world in different decades and learning how to be. Each character has a chapter and within the chapters their lives overlap. It soon becomes clear that their experiences, backgrounds and choices could not be more different.
The characters are flawed and complex: for example Bummi, the immigrant parent who would rather her child did anything but bring home a white partner; and later, an affair that explores one of the worst ways one woman can betray another. When each section ends, we leave with a new perspective.
The book concludes with these various black women of different generations, faiths, classes, politics and heritages, and a few men too – thrown together at a party for a grand finale. This is an exciting contemporary novel of our times, and I sped through it in one sitting.
I absolutely loved the way this book was written as a mix of prose and poetry, stripped of punctuation. The lack of punctuation allowed for the words to flow in my mind in a different way than they would with punctuation. In my opinion, it added a lot and really helped to emphasise that this is an ongoing story: one woman's life rolling into the next, without end. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, and I can't remember the last time I read a book so fast!
Girl, Woman, Other is about struggle, but it is also about love, joy and imagination. A must read!
Overall reaction: