Thank you to the publisher for allowing me to read and review this ARC. Full review to be found on Goodreads and on my website.

One of my new favorite books! This author has such a way with words the pages flew by in no time! I can’t wait to see the next work by this author! This was such a joy to read!

Thank you to the author Jessie Greengrass, the publisher Hogarth, and to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my candid review.

Hmmm.....interesting premise....a modern story of a couple interlaced with historic segments of historic inventors and innovators in medicine and the development of x-rays.

However, the story line about the couple who are trying to decide whether or not to have a child was irritating. The focal character was a woman whose perspective and inner world were too annoying for words. I did NOT like her or sypathise with her struggle to decide whether or not to have a baby......she hemmed and hawed and eventually had to go away by herself for a week and still had not made up her mind. If I were her husband, I would have left her long ago.....

The historic parts were fascinating.

So the book was not an entire train wreck....but I was glad to finish it.

Despite the positive reviews, I just couldn't get into this book. I dipped into it on more than one occasion, but always seemed to find myself choosing something else to read. So finally, I just gave up. Maybe one day, it will be the right time for this book, but not right now.

Stunning prose in this powerful first novel. Greengrass delves with great skill into the complexities and impossibilities of the epistomologies of pregnancy and motherhood. The novel is strikingly evocative and impressive.

I not sure what I was expecting when I decided to read this brief novel (less than 200 pages), but I can honestly say, it just was not my "cup of tea".

An unnamed narrator is expecting her second child and spends a great deal of time obsessing about everything: her first born growing up and away from her, her mother's death when she 20, the father who left her, a less than sensitive psychoanalyst grandmother and more.

I found the stream of consciousness writing style was somewhat off putting; the thoughts jump from one worried thought to another. There are lots of heavy themes in this short novel as well. Sorry I just can't recommend this one, it's depressing.

https://bibliophilebythesea.blogspot.com/2018/10/sight-jessie-greengrass.html

Cerebral in both tone and content, this debut is a work of striking intelligence and grace. It’s also a profoundly sad book and an unswervingly analytical one. Not, then, a cozy tale with which to curl up. But if your taste is for science, psychology, motherhood, the mysteries of the mind and the body, this is a book to relish.

I wanted to like this book. I was prepared to like this book. I am a science teacher, a daughter, and a mother - this book must be for me, right?. Unfortunately, the author is so in love with nice big intellectual introspective thoughts that it completely loses continuity. That continuity is not helped by the frequent digressions into the lives of Roentgen, Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, John Hunter, and others. I liked those digressions better than the rest of the book, but it was a bit of a disappointment to return to the “story”, which never quite made sense. I don’t think it is because the author is British, as there are many British authors that I do love. This just feels very pretentious, and I really couldn’t take it seriously. There are occasional passages that are interesting, but there is too much convolution and the use of thirty words when 5 would do. I actually gave it 2 stars, but rounded up to three for the digressions.
Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This novel is very highly reviewed and I feel like I must not have “gotten” it. What was the point of this? What was the point of any of this?

Okay, first, let me admit something that’s maybe a little shameful: I don’t typically get along with books that don’t have dialogue. I mean, there is definitely such a thing as too much dialogue, but there’s maybe five lines of dialogue in Sight and my brain desperately needs that natural breakage of lines and paragraphs. When a page is just a completely blocked off wall of text, it’s a guarantee that before I’m halfway down the page I’ll be thinking about a weird day at work last week or do I have any snacks in the pantry or I haven’t heard my cat in awhile, where is she? I also thought the writing in Sight was pretentious but that could just be frustration from constantly zoning out. Seriously, though, where has my cat hidden herself this time?

Something that irritated me was that Sight is, ultimately, a terrified mother reflecting on her relationships with her own mother and grandmother (great!) but the story is routinely diverted to reflections on various men and their medical achievements. I guess women were present in these men’s stories but they weren’t the focus. Give me a book about women that’s actually about women!

But let’s talk about the reflections on motherhood and daughterhood and granddaughterhood (not sure if these are actual words but “Granddaughterhood” is my new band name for sure). It doesn’t feel super unique, I guess. As a woman who doesn’t want children and is terrified of pregnancy, I couldn’t even relate to the narrator because I knew from the first line that she decides to have children. There’s a lot about grief in here, which, as someone privileged enough to have yet to experience significant grief in adulthood, the idea of my inevitable future grief petrifies me. The bits about grieving were well done, actually, but the subject makes me so uncomfortable. (My fault, not Greengrass’s fault! She’s not my therapist! I probably need a therapist though!)

I really enjoyed the bits at the grandmother’s house. That’s mostly it. This would be, like, a really cool blog, maybe. That’s less of an insult than it sounds, I promise. I would probably enjoy that blog and leave comments expressing a wish to see it turned into a book. I’m fickle that way.

I wasn't prepared to read this book. Thanks to NetGalley, I had an advanced copy that I confused with a different book, a thriller that seemed like a good end of summer, easy read. Instead, I got this gorgeous, thoughtful novel about life and loss and how much we can truly know or see about ourselves. Greengrass is an extraordinary writer, and this is a beautiful book.

This book covers a lot of ground between a daughter and a mother, both from the perspective of a daughter caring for her dying mother and from a young woman deciding on whether to become a mother, and then reflecting on going through that process for the first time, (she is currently pregnant with her second child). There is some beautiful writing in this novel as the author works through all of this. That being said, I do not think this book was for me, although I can see how many people liked this one. The author inserts different insights on psychoanalysis throughout the novel, trying to show different perspectives, and I think if she had stuck with the regular storyline I would have liked that better. I also think the character was highly reflective, and maybe that was the intent, but at some point it was too much for me.

Thank you to NetGalley for an electronic ARC of this book to review. All opinions above are my own.

3.5 Stars

Sight is the debut novel by Jessie Greengrass, and it is no wonder that the novel was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018 as its prose is gorgeous, haunting, and quite unlike anything that I've read before. I was immediately immersed in Greengrass's prose although admittedly, I felt at times the prose was overly dramatic since it so often seemed too pretentious. I quite often wanted to tell the narrator to stop telling us what seemed to be pages of paragraphs to express her thoughts when one sentence would have sufficed.

There really is no story arc in Sight so if you read the book, do not expect this to be driven by a plot or even a character since we never get to know the character as a person. Instead, the book focuses on the unnamed narrator's, a woman pregnant with her second child, philosophical thoughts, meditations, and explorations of her longing to be a mother, fears of being a mother, and the sense of loss she still has over the death of her own mother who died of a terminal illness when she was twenty-one, a loss she describes as fracturing her in two.

This is not light reading but is instead superb prose and brilliant writing full of acute insights into the struggles of deciding to be a mother, motherhood, losing a mother, and all the ways in which we define and try to understand ourselves. Yet, at times it is hard to get past the narrator's egocentrism and self-absorption as she appears detached from other women and mothers and makes it seem her thoughts and struggles are entirely exclusive.

Sight is a full exploration of the human condition, and Greengrass has clearly given readers many thoughts to ponder in their own exploration of self. While this book is not for everyone, I'd recommend it to readers who are fans of literary fiction, psychology, and books that tend to have a deeper and more philosophical dramatic arc.

**Thank you NetGalley and Hogarth Press for an ARC in exchange for my fair and honest review.**

A beautifully written and well told story that will stay with you long after you have read the last word. It will resonate as what it means to be someone's daughter, someone's mother and how devastating it is when you loose the most important person in your world. It's about being raised by a strong grandmother and how it shapes your world and who you are. Happy reading!

The writing is beautiful here, I might even go as far as to call it lyrical. But I didn't feel a connection to the narrator, so it was took me a long time to get through the novel, although it is fairly short.

3 stars only, which is sad cos I had high expectations!

Sight was a bit of a mixed bag for me and as a result it’s a book I find hard to review. It’s hard to deny that the book has many moments of true brilliance. I found myself becoming quite emotional multiple times throughout the book. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel that captures the dynamic between mothers and children quite so well as did this book. I admittedly had tears in my eyes multiple times due to the sheer ability this author had to use quiet moments to draw deeply profound insights.

My favorite moments in the book were the deeply personal moments of self-reflection of the protagonist’s relationships with her mother, grandmother, and child. In many ways, I felt like this author was inside my head, drawing out all my experiences of being a daughter and becoming a parent.

Interestingly while I was reading this book, I found myself engaging in more self-reflection and thinking about both my own mother and my daughter. Unfortunately, while I loved parts of the books, I was excruciatingly bored with other parts. Greengrass is clearly a talented author and some of her sentences are dazzling. But other sentences feel overwrought, overly academic, and slightly pretentious. Take this section for example where she describes morning sickness…

"All morning, caught up in the business of appointments, I had forgotten to feel sick, but now it returned, the constant queasy ostinato over which rose exhaustion’s disharmonious cadence, a progression paused before the point of resolution, aching forwards."

Sentences like these, irritated me to no end. I was stunned with the beauty and intelligence of the book but the majority of the time I felt bored and impatient with the writing. The inclusion of the other sections were clever in the ways in which all parts were tied together but they felt overly academic. In sum, I think the author is brilliant. That this was a debut is pretty astonishing.

I admired this book, but I did not love it. Sight is a beautifully written piece, and Jessie Greengrass is an astonishing wordsmith -- but to call it a story is a stretch. The book's narrator exhaustively examines her inner life around motherhood, daughterhood and partnership, but she reveals very little about herself or her mate. And her ruminations seemed quite specific to her station in life, so obsessive with "first world problems." I look for universality in anything I read.

Again, the craft is superlative. Each sentence is beautifully rendered, and the structure is skillful and solid. The metaphorical jaunts into medical science held my interest, perhaps more than the fictional characters.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This debut novel is very interesting in that the narrator weaves her introspection regarding motherhood with events in medical history. I especially liked the descriptions of Roentgen's discovery of X-Rays and the beginnings of human anatomy studies and surgery.. Freud's development of psychoanalysis, not so much. I found the introspection overdone and often boring. However, the theme of sight, looking within our bodies and minds, is clever andvery well done.

Sight is a really interesting little book. Half a meditation on motherhood through the narrator's personal experiences as a daughter, a granddaughter, and a mother, and half an investigation of humanity through brief non-fiction vignettes on the discovery of x-rays, psychoanalysis, and human anatomy. While seemingly unconnected, both sections weave together beautifully to create a unique exploration of "sight," or looking within, exploring oneself literally through seeing inside the human body, and figuratively through exploring our minds. There is no real story here, so readers who are interested in a plot will be disappointed, but I found the writing to be reminiscent of Clarice Lispector's style of thoughtful internal monologue relating the narrator's thoughts and reactions to experiences rather than focusing on the events themselves. However, my one quibble is that though this is a very introspective work, I don't feel like we ever got a good sense of the narrator as a person outside of her close relationships with her family, making it hard to be fully emotionally invested in her relationships and struggles, which could have made the book more engaging.

I keep promising myself that one year I will read the entire Women's Prize shortlist ahead of the prize being announced! I had not factored in the difficulty actually tracking down copies of the listed books, with many not yet readily available in North America. When I saw an ARC of Sight available on NetGalley I immediately requested it from the publisher (thank you, Crown Publishing!)

I really enjoyed this introspective and, at times almost stream-of consciousness, narrative reflection on motherhood in many of its permutations. The three chapters of this book capture different stages of the unnamed narrator's experiences as a mother, daughter and granddaughter. These include her deliberations on becoming a parent initially, the death of her own mother, and a reflection on her childhood summers spent at her grandmother's home (whom she refers to distantly as Doctor K). The language and the sense of place in this are just exquisite and really helped me feel immersed in this early on.  The pace and semblance of plot reminded me of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet - while there may not be so much happening in terms of movement, you get a deep dive into the narrator's experiences with motherhood in Sight in the way that Smith gives an analysis of world affairs and politics. The joy of reading the two was also a similar experience for me - I enjoyed my time in this narrator's thoughts so much that the progression of any plot per se seemed irrelevant for me.

I found the juxtaposition between the narrator's experiences and the medical history peppered throughout the chapters really fascinating, and for me this was most effectively done in the second chapter. I liked the way they were integrated into the narrative rather than being standalone chapters of their own, and think it made for a much more readable experience.

This was a brilliant debut novel and I look forward to reading more by Jessie Greengrass! Thanks again to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC copy of this in exchange for an honest review. Publication date in North America listed currently at 21 August 2018.

Sight is an introspective and experimental novella that is narrated by an unnamed woman who is pregnant with her second child. She contemplates what it means to be a parent while grieving the death of her mother.

The story alternates between the present day and historical snapshots that center around prominent medical professionals such as Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Rontgen. Greengrass does an excellent job blending everyday musings and nonfiction narratives to provide an unique insight into motherhood, medicine and the human body.

Even though not much happens in the book plot wise, the writing is captivating and so beautifully intricate that it is hard not to be swept away. I really enjoyed reading this and look forward to re-visiting it in the future!

Thanks to NetGalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.