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.

Book and Film Globe review:

Scan all the lists naming the best works of 2019 and you’ll repeatedly see the title Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, an acclaimed British writer new to me. It’s a treat, even though a brief description of this Booker Prize winner sounds noble and worthy in an “oh dear” sense. Evaristo offers a multiplicity of voices, all of them women of color living in the UK. Some reviews suggest it’s an inspiring choir of female empowerment. Yes, but thankfully her novel is also witty, captivating, cleverly structured and fun.

That structure reveals itself slowly. In Chapter One, we hear from Amma, Yazz and Dominique. Amma is a playwright with a new show opening at the National in London that very night. Yazz is her daughter and Dominique is her friend. Their stories diverge wildly and comment on one another in subtle and direct ways. In Chapter Two, we hear from Carole, Bummi and LaTisha and they are a daughter, a mother and a friend. Slowly we realize everyone has a link to one another and most of them will converge at the after party for Amma’s (hopefully) triumphant new play.

I need to read more of Evaristo because her work is so confident and true here. You know immediately you’re in good hands. These characters constantly catch you off guard, or, rather, Evaristo does. Carole is a high-powered player in the financial world, reaching higher and farther than her immigrant mother ever imagined. But her mom Bummi’s voice is so strong and infectious you can’t think of Carole any longer without thinking of her mother’s journey too. And when Carole dismisses the chances of a classmate she leaves far behind, you’re ashamed to have agreed with her when LaTisha takes center stage and we discover her path.

Again and again, Evaristo does this. A minor character, even a dislikable one, leaps from one section’s background to another section’s spotlight. As in life, people surprise and confound and startle you until you just accept that you don’t really know anyone until you’ve worked hard to empathize and listen to their story.

All of this is done in free verse, here a style that permits Evaristo’s words to flow and fly. She shoots high and skips across decades and then swoops down low to a particular moment. The poetic line breaks put certain scenes into sharp relief, like the heartbreaking story of a rape and its aftermath. Then the verse takes off again at light speed, pulling you along to meet person after person, from a 90-plus-year-old matriarch overseeing the family estate (and a terrible secret), to a schoolteacher who lives to give a leg up to worthy students but never receives her due, to a woman abandoned by a sailor in 1895, a sailor who promises to return but the only thing that arrives is a baby. Sometimes free verse slows you down. But here it’s rocket fuel.

I can’t recommend reading this as an e-book. While the line breaks appear in their proper places, the visual display of the text will change depending on whether you’re on a phone or tablet or E-reader and yet again depending on the font and font size. A physical copy is paramount to know you’re reading it the way Evaristo intended. And it is a pleasure to read.

Girl, Woman, Other loses a little steam towards the end. The story of Megan, who became Morgan, is involving. But an extended section covering their online exploration of ideas like gender fluidity, transsexual, transgender and such was accurate but no more thrilling than reading any online chat room. Also, the play’s afterparty didn’t deliver quite the climax I expected, and while I found a final emotional epilogue intellectually satisfying, it didn’t knock me over.

Those are small reservations about this novel. Any section would make a satisfying story in its own right. Taken as a whole, it is indeed an inspiring choir of female empowerment. Yet each voice receives the solo it richly deserves, and Evaristo orchestrates it all to bring clarity instead of cacophony. It’s a beguiling melody whether you’re a girl, a woman, or other.

-- Michael Giltz

https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/girl-woman-other/

Oh my my! What can I even say about this book! I finished reading this book a while ago but I needed time to process my thoughts. I have read books about people of color but mostly it's biased as it is written by white people. But this book feels more relatable as it is written by a person of color. One of the best books I have ever read and should have been the only winner of the man Booker.

I loved this book! Great storytelling and character development. Contemporary and original. I learned of this book through its nomination for the Man Booker Prize. It won and deservedly so.

This book is remarkable, smart, makes you think and is sensitive to all the topics mentioned and is real and authentic. It is so good that it needs to be read by everyone. I read the entire Booker Prize Longlist and do not think any other book (i.e. The Testaments) came close to it. READ IT!

This novel explores what it means to be black and a woman in Britain. Beginning with Amma, a lesbian theater director and activist, each chapter focuses on a new character, each connected in some way to the other characters in the novel. So Amma's story is followed by her daughter's, then a friend's, then a girl she knew at school, spiraling outward before settling in to following the family history of Morgan, a young woman not entirely comfortable in her body, and reaching back through time to eventually tell the story of her great-grandmother, a Yorkshire farmer.

I was ready to abandon the novel halfway through the third chapter, as each character became more obsessed with their image, but Evaristo then set that on its head, even as each woman has to consciously decide how she will present herself to the world. I ended up fascinated by each woman's story and how they all fit together. The final part, where all the contemporary women are in the same space, is less satisfying than the previous part, where generations of a single family are followed in reverse chronological order, but I appreciated getting to see how each woman was viewed by others. I do like the format Evaristo used of a series of short stories about women with varying degrees of proximity. I will definitely be looking at Evaristo's previous books.

I feel as though it's a requirement to like this book in order to seem properly woke, but I didn't like it at all. Did not finish.

It’s very difficult to review ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ as I have so many things to say yet at the same time, any words I use will not be able to sum up how I feel about it. In short, it was astounding.

Before starting this wonderful book I was concerned I wouldn’t enjoy it due to the lack of the usual punctuation I’m used to in every other book I read. However, once you start reading it flows extremely well and even reads like poetry at times. The prose is so beautiful it immerses you immediately and I was reluctant to put it down. I suddenly found myself reading whilst exercising, eating and during any other activity that allowed me to hold a book simultaneously. It was that incredible.

‘Girl, Woman, Other’ is an exquisite masterpiece and everybody should read it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Let me preface this by saying that this book was amazing and felt to me like it could easily become a classic.

In it, we follow many different women, mostly black, from varied backgrounds and who have varied identities ; some are lesbians, some are conservatives, some parts of the story are set in modern day, some in the past, there are so many themes being explored from race to feminism to sexuality and more, I was fascinated by every aspect.

I did like some characters better than others but they were all interesting and added to the story.

I don't think the writing style of this book will be for everyone as there's no punctuation marks but I think it does a lot for the rythme of the book, if you can get into it.

Overall one of the best books I've read in a long time, highly recommend!

This is a collection of stories about twelve black women in the UK, whose lives turn out to be linked in various ways. They range across all social classes and many decades, but are unified in their aim to make a better life for themselves and their children.

I really enjoyed this, and admired how cleverly Evaristo linked her stories, and the new light she was able to shine on her characters by showing them from a different perspective in another story. There were some surprises along the way and a very affecting ending. I haven't read the Atwood book, but I can see why this won the Man Booker.

When this book was named a co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker Prize, I acquired a copy.

Throughout this book, Bernardine Evaristo weaves threaded short stories together, culminating at an artistic debut of an avant garde play. The women may be friends, competitors, family members, all struggling with their identity and their place in the world.

It should be mentioned that there is minimal punctuation, so I had to make a concerted effort to read and understand so I could decipher where one thought ended and the next began. I found myself pausing, having to slow down and re-read to learn where quotations stopped or a new sentence began, which did limit how much time I could give the book before taking a break.

(I received a digital ARC from Grove Atlantic via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.)

Girl, Woman, Other vibrates with life! What a stunning novel and such a creative storytelling format. The words flow with a rhythm that's almost poetic. I was a little nervous at first, because I thought I wouldn't be able to maintain focus since use of punctuation is a bit different, but the I found myself lost in the beautiful prose, and excited to learn about each character and how they're all connected to each other. Fantastic book!

4.5, these characters came alive

Okay. When an author knows how to make words dance, I’m a goner. I put on my tap shoes and am ready to go. I hear music and rhythm and suddenly my book cubby doubles as a jazz club. The author has this cool style; the story pops out and is all jittery and still in the right places. When the author is at her best, emotions flood hard out of the characters and get soaked up into my skin. It’s stream-of consciousness, prose poetry. The style seduced me: In a single paragraph, the author changes point of view so you can hear each character thinking and talking, in her own voice, with her own way of saying things. We hear secrets and rawness and vulnerability, and the voice is often plaintive. All this makes the characters seem so real. The cadence and tone are perfection, and each character sounds so different from each other. What the author has done is hard, and it’s a testament to her wildly excellent writing skills.

A reviewer from Washington Independent Review of Books summed it up perfectly:

“Evaristo’s verbal acrobatics do things language shouldn’t be able to do. It’s a Cirque du Soleil of fiction.”

There are 12 stories and 12 people (mostly British black women), and some stories are interrelated. The characters are so fascinating, I was glued to the page. We have old and young; straight, gay, and transgender; winners and losers; rich and poor; artists and bankers; traditionalists and resisters; goody-two-shoers and hellions, homebodies and travelers, scholars and partiers. Abused. Sad. Unfulfilled. Regretful. Vigorous. Ambitious. Bossy. Proud. But the huge character array aside, what made me love this book (besides the beauteous language, of course) is the depth of character, the author’s psychological insight, and the nuanced feelings.

The scope of this book is epic. It spans two centuries, but it’s close in, too. I felt like I was being let in on secrets—for me, the best kind of read there is. And I learned so much about cultures I knew nothing about. The book is topical, too—Brexit and Trump are mentioned, for example. And a surprise: the writer Roxane Gay is mentioned—three times, in fact! (Appreciated muchly by this Gay fan!) I think the strongest stories have to do with sex and gender. I’m still thinking about several of the characters.

Surprise, surprise, I do have some gripes, though, which prevented the book from reaching 5-star land.

Complaint Board

-Sometimes the paragraphs don’t dance: sometimes they stand still and sound didactic—messages about feminism, mostly, but also about race, oppression, prejudice, and gender. When the author starts lecturing, I can feel myself stiffen and get wary. I want pure character, not idea spouts. I don’t want to enter the classroom even for a second. Luckily it’s not heavy-handed—but I think that’s because I liked the book so much, I looked the other way. I DID learn a lot, but that was when the author showed me instead of told me.

-The book is too long, about 450 pages. I prefer books to be about 350 pages (yes, there are exceptions). I’m a slow reader, which bugs me. I end up living with a book longer than I want to.

-which leads me to my third complaint: It was hard to keep track of all the characters and their relationships. Several times, great-grandmothers and grandfathers got air time, and who they married got thrown in for good measure, and I had to keep this huge family tree in my head. It was frustrating and painful, as I tried to nudge (no, push) my brain to work harder. Actually I ended up writing a short summary of each character’s story, which helped, though it was time-consuming. Thank god for the Kindle’s Search feature—I could look up a character and see exactly where she was mentioned before, and jog my memory. I’m sure young whippersnappers have fresher brains that can track it way better than I could.

One gripe cannot be listed on the Complaint Board because it’s my own problem. This is so not PC, but I can’t help it. Here goes: I’m a mess when a transgender person or other-gendered person chooses to use the “they” pronoun. I know it’s harder for me because I was an editor. For decades, I’ve made sure the pronoun was right in everything I edited. Of course a person has a singular pronoun, of course. That was the way it was supposed to be, period. No wiggle room. Now I have to reprogram my head, and it’s hard. Reading “they” when referring to one person is way harder than hearing it, it turns out. I kept cringing and thinking there was more than one person being talked about. I automatically reached for my red pencil, a nervous tic almost. I’ll just have to twist and wiggle until I get used to it; hope it’s soon!

I just loved this book. It’s the kind of book that I’m pushing onto every friend in sight. Now I want to read her earlier work and check uTube for author interviews. Highly recommend.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

I cannot read this ecopy, due to significant formatting issues. I will be buying the book to read. I did reach out to the publisher for help, but received no response.

In my off-line life, I write a lot of technical stuff where clarity is of overriding importance. Short sentences are better than long-winding ones. Punctuation should be used wherever needed. Grammatical rules should be observed.

Unsurprisingly, when I realised that the lack of full stops and commas in Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-prize winning novel was no technical glitch in my Kindle file but part-and-parcel of the reading experience, my linguistically-rigid self was sorely tempted to put the (e-)book down. My cynical persona was also quick to chip in and mischievously suggest that, to be considered for a literary award these days, a novel should:

(i) avoid the use of punctuation and traditional sentences and

(ii) proclaim itself as woke from the outset, in this case by featuring as protagonist of the very first chapter an Anglo-African feminist lesbian playwright

A few pages into Girl, Woman, Other however, these dissenting voices were laid to rest. Evaristo adopts an adventurous approach but is, at heart, a masterful storyteller. In this work she presents us with twelve tales about twelve British women, one identifying as non-binary, all of whom have African roots and/or connections. Each of the individual stories could potentially be a self-standing novella.

When the reader takes a step back, Evaristo’s skill in structuring her novel becomes readily apparent. The stories, linked in four related groups/chapters of three, all result to be, in some way or another, intertwined. They are framed by a specific event, the premiere of Amma’s feminist play at the National Theatre. At the end, we discover an unexpected coda which ties up a few remaining loose ends and provides an almost old-fashionedly satisfying conclusion.

As for the women’s stories themselves, Evaristo commented as follows in a recent interview for the Guardian:

I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women weren’t visible in literature. I whittled it down to 12 characters – I wanted them to span from a teenager to someone in their 90s, and see their trajectory from birth, though not linear. There are many ways in which otherness can be interpreted in the novel – the women are othered in so many ways and sometimes by each other. I wanted it to be identified as a novel about women as well.

Indeed, I felt that the theme of the “Other” is central to the novel. The structural complexity of the Evaristo’s work mirrors the complexity of interactions in the contemporary world. The “black British womenhood” alluded to by the author is not a monolithic structure, but more of a colourful tapestry or mosaic. The novel’s choral approach is eminently suited to portray this. In this respect, Girl, Woman, Other is not just a good, but, even, a necessary novel.

GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER by Bernardine Evaristo is a spectacular sprawling narrative told through the perspectives of “mostly women, Black and British” (as @goodreads helpfully articulates!). It is written in a unique and experimental style that plays with sentence structure and punctuation, and has a stream of consciousness vibe that I actually felt was very easy to fall into. Each perspective had such a unique voice, but felt like the baton was seamlessly passed to continue the story without jolting that feeling of progression. The highlight for me was the way all of these characters connected and told a story of community and an exploration of gender at various intersections.

I’ll read anything written by Bernardine Evaristo, her writing and storytelling is just superb! Many thanks to @groveatlantic @netgalley for a review copy, and to @inkandpaperblog for buddyreading this with me!

DNF - I just couldn't get into the style of this book. It felt like reading poetry and too hard to get a sense of what was happening.