Girl, Woman, Other

I was very ready not to enjoy this book. Made up of a set of short stories. Each one with a different character. It's bound to be difficult to really get into. Not a bit of it. The book still felt like a whole. Sometimes one story segues into another, other times it just the tone, the threads of thought, or contrasts between them. The chapters each focus on one person, mostly black women, and their personalities are different. Sometimes it feels a little caricatured, how complicated can you get in a few 10s of pages, but at the same time never too much and aren't we all somehow fitting one or other stereotype. A whole range of social topics: life in England as black, poor, rich, lesbian, non-binary... are played out and woven throughout the stories. An enjoyable and thoughtful read.

I’m very late to the afterparty, but hey. Got this as a present a while ago, but never got around to reading it. Thanks to sickness I finally made it. And what can I say. It’s wonderful. The language, the characters, the way Evaristo is able to paint their complicated, lovable, hatable, conflicted life stories. It’s a book about identity, about belonging and alienation, surviving and thriving.

A magnificent novel that follows the interconnecting lives of a choir of characters in the United Kingdom. Evaristo writes in a poetic and sometimes fragmented style. I loved her voice and pen, and this book was a highlight of my reading list in 2021.

I loved this book, in part because in an earlier incarnation I studied feminist theater in London and this was so evocative of that world. It's big and messy in the ways that women's groups in that era were/are. And I'm still pissed that they made her share the Booker with Atwood