Girl, Woman, Other
Author: Bernadine Evaristo
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
From one of Britain’s most celebrated writers of color, Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women. Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.
The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London's funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley's former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole's mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter's lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.
Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.
TL;DR Review
Girl, Woman, Other is a beautifully written, raw, and real look at women from all walks of life, today and in days past. I devoured every word.
For you if: You are open to reading a hybrid between prose and poetry and don’t mind keeping track of many characters.
Full Review
“For the sisters & the sistas & the sistahs & the sistren & the women & the womxn & the wimmin & the womyn & our brethren & our bredrin & our brothers & our bruvs & our men & our mandem & the LGBTQI+ members of the human family.”
— the novel’s dedication
Girl, Woman, Other won the 2019 Booker Prize, and so I had very high expectations. They were not disappointed. This book is everything I love about literary fiction: raw and gutting language, a strong connection to humanity, joy and sorrow together, shared and unique experiences.
The format of the book is gloriously uncommon — somewhere between prose and poetry. Each paragraph is at most a sentence (and so they are often quite short), but there are no periods until the end of the section. Commas are used on purpose rather than according to “rules.” There is a cadence, a rhythm, and lines are often split strategically. I devoured it!
For example:
“she slipped free crusty pies filled with apple-flavoured lumps of sugar to the runway rent boys she befriended who operated around the station
with no idea that in years to come she’d be attending their funerals
they didn’t realize unprotected sex meant a dance with death
nobody did”
Each mini-chapter is told through the eyes of a different character, around 12 in all. They are different ages, races (although mostly Black), sexualities, and gender identities (although mostly cis). Their chapters are grouped into sets of three, with the three women connected to one another somehow. (For example, woman-daughter-best friend.) By the end, as you might expect, many of them end up loosely connected in some way.
But all of them have a unique experience that connects them to the broader shared experience of womanhood, whether they bulk of their story is happening today or happened long in the past. This is what won the Booker Prize; this is what makes this book worthy of your time.
How lucky are we to live in a time when books like this a) exist, b) are widely available, and c) win major literary prizes?
Trigger Warnings
Sexual assault/rape
Domestic/relationship abuse
Child abuse/pedophilia/incest
Pregnancy/childbirth
Miscarriage
Racism and racial slurs
Transphobia and trans misogyny
Homophobia and heterosexism
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