I am very late on this review, as this book as since won many awards and been placed on many book lists. While this book didn’t personally do it for me, I get confused easily when books have a lot of characters and that is an understatement here, I completely respect the authors talent. I really enjoyed certain sections of the book, but I feel like I missed some of the big picture themes/connections. Nonetheless, I would definitely recommend this to readers who like this style of literary fiction

What an incredible book! One of the best I’ve read in a while. Each section grabs you, puts you through an emotional rollercoaster and spits you out (in the best possible way!) The writing was my favorite part - Bernardine Evaristo writes so beautifully, the words were like magic in my head as I read through - beautifully done and I can’t wait to read more by this author!

Girl, Woman, Other is a powerful, engaging book that interweaves the stories of multiple characters across different generations. It was a highly pleasurable read overall, although this is not to ignore the fact that it does deal with some difficult subject matter throughout. I was very enthralled by it and the way Evaristo connected different characters and their lives together. I highly recommend this book fo readers who enjoy diverse, multi-generational tales.

Sad it took me so long to get to this book, especially when I had an advanced copy from NetGalley.  But I think listening to this one made it even better for me. Either way, I’m so glad I finally read it and recommend it to all. Beautiful and moving and such an important read.

I'm so glad that this book won the Booker Prize last year. Bernardine Evaristo deserves all the praise for this multi-generational look at the lives of many characters whose lives intertwine. I'm glad I took my time with this one. I especially loved reading a story from a daughter's point of view followed by her mother's point of view. So much love and wisdom was put into this book.

I truly loved it. I couldn't stop reading and stayed up late, then got up early to finish. The only challenge in writing a review is that my highlights aren't as useful as they usually are because I highlighted way too much (literally hundreds of paragraphs), seemingly almost everything because every line has meaning. For example, this passage on the indelible Amma:

Amma was shorter, with African hips and thighs perfect slave girl material one director told her when she walked into an audition for a play about Emancipation whereupon she walked right back out again

Girl, Woman, Other is many things: a brilliant social novel, heavy on well-observed, sharp societal commentary, but organically so, and never weighed down by it. Very specific in its characterizations and voice. A tapestry in verse. An engrossing, often witty, ensemble drama about Black British women of different backgrounds, sexuality, and social strata with some surprising formal anomalies like no periods and little capitalization. Those formal elements are partly responsible for creating Girl, Woman, Other's wonderful sense of lyricism. They also effectively mimic trains of thought and conversation. Eventually, though, they easily fade into the background.

One passage I loved in the first section, partly because it made me laugh, was when Yazz, the daughter of a playwright/theatre director and a public intellectual, was mentally running through how she had won an argument with her Dad, Roland, taking him down a notch by questioning lofty position as "the country's first Professor of Modern Life." I enjoyed Yazz's loving intergenerational warfare with people who are used to being/thinking of themselves as the avant garde.

Dad didn’t reply
he wasn’t expecting this, the student outwitting the master (grasshopper rocks!)
I mean, how on earth can you be a Professor of Modern Life when your terms of reference are all male, and actually all-white (even when you’re not, she refrained from adding),


And I was moved by the interplay between Yazz and her university friend Waris, which appears shortly after that, and the conversation with her white working class friend Courtney about relative privilege and context, which is an interesting counterpart to Yazz's triumph over Roland:

Yazz doesn’t know what to say, when did Court read Roxane Gay – who’s amaaaazing?
was this a student outwitting the master moment? #whitegirltrumpsblackgirl


Funny, poignant, ironic. Brilliant.

Girl, Woman, Other de Bernardine Evaristo foi o meu primeiro contacto com a autora inglesa, com ascendência nigeriana.

Mas este não é, de todo o seu romance de estreia, pois já conta com 8 obras publicadas.

Todavia, esta foi a obra que lhe granjeou maior notoriedade, ao vencer o Booker de 2019.

 

Girl, Woman, Other segue a vida de 12 mulheres negras, de variadas idades (da adolescência aos 90 anos) e com variados espectros de vivências, seja pela sua origem, orientação sexual, profissão, escolaridade, etc. As histórias destas mulheres cruzam-se, seja porque se conhecem ou porque têm um grau indirecto de relacionamento.

 

O resultado desse entrecruzar de vivências acaba por reflectir a experiência humana de ser mulher, com barreiras adicionais que vêm com a pobreza, migração ou cor de pele.

 
Porém, nunca tendo sido migrante ou prejudicada pela minha cor, foi impossível não sentir uma sororidade com todas elas: eu já vivi isto ou eu compreendo como isso poderia acontecer-me.

Este é um livro magnífico. É inequivocamente o melhor livro que li em 2020 e definitivamente um dos melhores livros que li durante toda a minha vida.


Recomendo vivamente.

E se os senhores pensam que é um livro só para mulheres, Barak Obama nomeou-o como uma das suas leituras preferidas de 2019.

I'm ashamed that it took me so long to read Girl, Woman, Other. It tells twelve interconnected stories that discuss the lives of the chapter's narrator and the racism and sexism prevalent in English culture. 

There were a few stories that didn't grip me as much as others but overall it was a fantastic job. The writing is poetic and lyrical. Although there isn't punctuation present, except a few question marks, the reader is easily able to follow the rhythm of the stories. I think it was a travesty that Girl, Woman, Other has to share The Book Prize from 2019 with The Testament. It should have been the solo winner but that's just my uneducated opinion. 

This was my first novel by Bernardine Evaristo but it will not be my last. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an egalley for review. I also purchased my own copy because it's THAT good.

An amazing book!  Manages to tell the stories of twelve women that themselves tell a story of Black British history.  Both the individual stories and the whole are brilliantly written.  Bravo!!

Congratulations to Evaristo on winning the Booker Prize! This was a well deserved honor. Girl, Woman, Other is a powerful look at gender and race. Each of the 12 characters were such strong female characters and I love how Evaristo wove together their stories. An important and powerful read for women everywhere!

Wow! That’s how I walked away from this book! These stories were magical and I loved the twists and turns they took me and how each of the stories intertwined in some way. So many unexpected things happened and I found myself taking so many notes on each character. 

I think my favorite stories were Dominique, Bummi, Carole and Winsome. Such a wonderfully written collection of short stories and I can see why it’s received so many accolades. A ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ read for me!

It took forever to read this book. I started it months ago but didn't get into it. You really need to sit down for this book. Absorb the stories of different women experiencing different lives. Once I found my pace with this book, I admired it. Every single one of the twelve characters has a story to tell. A life lived in sadness, anger, happiness. 

The author manages to bring the suffering of the characters to the reader. I felt their worries and shared in their anger. Some I could understand, some I won't understand from my pov. I completely understand why this was nominated and eventually won the Booker Prize.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  I am ashamed to say I had a hard time starting this and procrastinated on reading this gem.  

It is not written in a conventional way and the words are like poetry.  I was persuaded to join in on a buddy read for this and I’m glad I did.  This book covers 12 different women and gives us a snippet of their lives.  Some of the women are connected as we find out in the book, some are not.

I loved that this book represented a diverse array of women and their stories. It seems like you never get a chance to see this representation in stories, it’s usually a minor part among many white characters,  The women range from teenagers to old age, teenage mothers, non binary, lesbians.  

I really enjoyed how this book was written.  It took some getting used to but the writing made you pause to think.  It is very much deserving of all the awards and accolades it is receiving.

I pretty much wanted to keep reading this and reading about different women.  I really enjoyed this one.

I just loved this book. It was my first real self-quarantine read, and it was so cozy to curl up with this book and live in their world for a while. While it took me a bit to settle in with the slang and cadence, once I got used to it, it welcomed me into their world much better than code-switching Queens English would have, even though I’m a cishet American white woman. Everisto painted her characters and their relationships so vividly, and even though sometimes I’m not a fan of so many narrators, because I was so immersed in their world, the connection to the larger narrative was usually pretty clear.

There’s been a fair amount of dispute in the literary world over whether this book should have had to share the Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. I think this is clearly a better book, even though I enjoyed both of them (which is not always the case with literary prize winners.) I really wish Evaristo would keep writing about this crowd (like Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City) since I am missing their world already. I think Yazz and Morgan and Carole and even GG and her farm have storylines left, so hopefully we will hear more from them in the future. And I hope this goes far in the Tournament of Books: it might be my remaining favorite.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I've have tried reading this book two different times. The first before it was released and the second after it has won many awards and received so many positive accolades on instagram. However, each time it has fallen short for me -- a character-driven, deep dive fan. This felt more like short stories that led no where and I kept asking myself what the point was. I know this is mainly not the case for most of its readers so I think this is just a case of right book, wrong person.

I really enjoyed this, and am pleased to say that it kept my attention from beginning to end.  There is a lot to consider whilst reading this novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

A beautiful novel allowing the space for twelve “mostly women, black, and British” (and queer!) characters to tell their stories. Each person has their own section presenting snapshots from multiple times in their lives, highlighting both the experiences which altered their lives and those in their day-to-day realities. We learn about their living conditions, the people who surround them, the trauma they endure.

There are four chapters that each include three subsequent perspectives. While the voices within a chapter were clearly connected, I loved how connections across chapters were slowly revealed. I want someone to make a character web just so I can see if I missed any of the more subtle connections. 

This book is written in a loose style: a mix of verse and prose with plenty of commas and line breaks but only a handful of periods in each chapter. Once I got into the flow of the writing, I did not have any trouble with it. It gave each character the space they needed to share asides and reflection throughout their stories. 

I trusted Evaristo to take me on this ride, and she did not let me down. Despite covering a lot of ground, each character is portrayed as multi-faceted, flawed, and unique. Each has a different experience moving through the world, which influenced their perspectives on racism, sexism, feminism. 

A side note: I found that the physical book worked much better than an e-book, both for getting used to the structure and for quickly flipping back and connecting different characters.

Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the free e-copy of this book!

What an experience reading this novel was; Bernardine Evaristo shares life experiences that stretch a century back in time and move towards our immediate, contemporary world. Pure literature.

Through loosely connected short stories, Evaristo explores the changing landscape of black womanhood (and otherhood) in Britain. The characters present a breadth of experiences and identities, and I really appreciate the range of this collection. The book started off really strong and got a little soft during the second half. But overall, this book deserves the critical acclaim it received. It's a work that's entirely original and unexpected.

At first, I didn't particularly like the women in Girl, Woman, Other, but I don't find likable characters to be a prerequisite to a likable book. Evaristo knows this. In fact, I believe it to be her point. While most readers will embrace one or many or all of these women, the point is that there are commonalities among us all and especially among women of color which evokes in us a sense of responsibility towards one another whether or not we like each other.