Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
There are favorite books and then there are Lifetime Favorite Books. I know them when I read them. I almost crave them. I mourn when I have to send them back to the library, and then I remember that someone else is hopefully waiting to meet the book love of their life.
Bernardine Evaristo crafted this book, this love of mine, from something she calls “fusion fiction,” something that looks and feels like narrative poetry but lives in the world of fiction. The novel follows the stories of mostly Black women in Britain and challenges the ideas of race, class, and gender all the while filling in many of my historical blind spots (we Americans are so self-centered) and teaching me what a f****** beautiful book can look and feel like.
Each aspect of the novel is carefully sculpted, nothing is out of place; it all weaves into a complex and beautiful work of art. The interconnectedness of the characters is natural, like the real world—that six degrees of separation we’re all familiar with. The development of the twelve main characters is seamless. I watched them grow, they were real, really real, flaws and all. This book was so alive. Thank you Bernardine Evaristo, I’m in your debt.
A Bit About the Structure:
The structure was like nothing I’ve experienced before. Until I read that Evaristo called it “fusion fiction” I clumsily referred to it as “stream-of-consciousness-poetry-like prose, without periods”. Obviously, she said it better.
And when I saw it on that first page I was a little nervous that it would be challenging to read—not that I don’t like a challenge, but I wondered if the seven people behind me on the Wait List at the library who had been waiting weeks or months already, would end up waiting a bit longer than the usually allotted two weeks for new books while I finished. My concerns were baseless. It was one of the most free-flowing books I’d ever read. The line breaks worked as the missing punctuation and it flowed forth like a river. And I want more of it.
CW/TW: domestic violence. If you want to skip over it, it located in Dominique’s section and briefly mentioned after, though not in detail.
