The term stream of consciousness is bandied about a lot to describe books, but this is a true example of the form. I for one find these nonlinear crafts really fun to mix into my stack of thrillers and fictional dramas - it gets your brain all twisted and thinking outside of the box and deep inside the sorted mind of another. In Little Scratch Rebecca Watson captures the disarray of human consciousness as a woman goes through the course of a day. I think another reader put it perfectly that Rebecca Watson "succeeds in capturing the ordinary chaos of consciousness."

I struggled with little scratch, not so much because of the content but because of the formatting of my e-ARC. I could be wrong, but it felt like Watson was trying to do some interesting things with page layout as well to show the collisions of multiple trains of thought. This was impossible to follow on Kindle and so I wish I had had a paper copy of the book because it really impacted my ability to enjoy the text. I think the book is probably much better and smarter than I was able to discern by reading it in this format.

I can definitely see how this book has an audience, but it was not me. I could not get into the writing style. I had to push really hard to get through this one, and I really wanted to like it, but the writing style made that difficult.

This has to be one of the most original formats I've ever read for a book. Told through a stream of consciousness, this is a collection of all the thoughts the protagonist has throughout a single day in her life.

I didn't really know what this going to read like when I first started it as the cluttered pages of multiple thoughts at once confused me. Yet the more I read, the easier to become to follow.

This was an incredibly immersive book, so it's really hard to accurately review, so stick with me. Firstly, I adored the main character. She was blunt yet quiet, which is something I very much relate to. At times her thoughts were almost suffocating as her anxiety kept rearing it's ugly head, and when she'd be continuously reminded of her recent sexual assault it felt like all the air was sucked out of your body. Once you get a flow going while reading this, you almost forget that her thoughts aren't your own. Which is an incredible feat by the author.

All in all, this book won't be for everyone. But if you connect with the story, it will be a very memorable read. Give it a shot.

Thank you to #NetGalley for an ARC.

I understand what the author was trying to accomplish through this book. She was able to capture the stream of consciousness effect very well. However, the book was tiring to read. The lack of structure and scattered thoughts is difficult to comprehend through the page and lacked cohesiveness.

Overall, a great concept, but somewhat lacking in execution.

little scratch made made me work hard, and I'm not sure it has a 'payoff' in a traditional novelistic sense. The language is spiky and fragmentary and the storytelling style approaches its subject--a woman trying to cope with the trauma of sexual abuse--in a manner that mirrors that shattering dislocation.

Many of the pages scan like poetry, which made me want to slow down and read it like a poem. But then I realized that a faster reading pace--the pace of thought--was a much better way to appreciate the novel, and to grasp its meanings. I needed to train myself to read this book.

I also needed to stop questioning what the author is up to, and whether she succeeds. I needed to drop all judgment and expectation. As I read, I kept comparing the novel with other literary experiments with stream-of-consciousness and/or auto-writing, and finding this novel to be relatively artless by comparison, but I just needed to cut it out. I'm comparing it with, you know, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and perhaps a bit with Gertrude Stein, and in all of these authors' cases their language is no longer surprising...we've learned how to read Joyce by now, like the way we learned to hear Stravinsky without throwing rotten fruit at the stage and walking out, When I began the novel I didn't know how to read Rebecca Watson. By the end. I did, which makes it a perfect candidate for a re-read.

I didn't realize that this was only a partial book. If this is it ...very small book and I'm trying to like this book. Very interesting and love how she changes over the morning so far.

This is certainly an experimental work, and while I appreciate the uniqueness I fear it didn’t work for me. My own brain is frantic enough without hopping into someone else’s (ha).

Ebook, ARC from NetGalley.
DNF at 15%.

I expected this book to have a coherent story... with sentences. And grammar. And punctuation. I was mistaken.

If you like stream-of-consciousness poetry that takes a long time to get anywhere, you might like this book. I don't.

After reading the word "walking" no fewer than 50 times on a single page, I was uncertain I w⁹ould make it much longer. After I got to a paragraph (rather, a block of text) that contained the single word "filing" 45 times -- uninterrupted -- I gave up.

This is not for me. There's no story here. There's only word vomit.