Book #43: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a book that I'd been meaning to read for a while, and wasn't sure what to expect.
Once you get past the slight disregard for the usual conventions of punctuation and sentence construction (only proper nouns begin with capitals, also no full stops or speech marks), this is quite enjoyable.
So, most chapters revolve around different characters (twelve in total); eleven women, and one non-binary character. All, as I understood it, were people of colour. The individual stories are also not completely separate, but cross over with each other, so I was able to notice characters from previous chapters mentioned later on in the book.
Each chapter was less of a linear narrative, but a sort of potted history of each character, which meant that they all ended up being fleshed out much more than any character in just about any other book or series that I have read. All have different backstories, including a woman who discovers that she is adopted, and another telling of the tragedy of losing a child. The moment when I became hooked was in the third chapter, which was about one of the characters finding herself trapped in a cult.
One of the main themes of this book was about relationships, and as well as seeing how the characters related to each other, the book introduced characters who they were romantically entangled with, and I noticed that several of the characters ended up in lesbian relationships.
I wasn't too surprised when this book got political at times, with a lot of social commentary; as well as involving gay and trans rights, race featured heavily in the novel, which was perhaps not surprising, and I got the sense that there was a lot of anger.
Yet, at the same time it did not feel like I was being bashed over the head with a woke or feminist agenda, as the characters who featured in the book took a lot of different stances on the political spectrum.
Overall, I was glad I read it, but would want to read it again to pick up anything I might have missed the first time.
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