Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo

HIGHLY RECOMMEND! 

I just finished Girl, Woman, Other and though I’d planned to write this week’s review about another book, couldn’t resist substituting this one instead. I had nominated the book for our book club, mainly because Bernadine Evaristo won the Booker Prize for it, and that’s always been a reliable bellwether for me. 
 
And I’m very glad I did - I really enjoyed it, although I did struggle initially with the way it’s written, very eecummings, almost no punctuation, sentences don’t start with a capital letter and sometimes aren’t sentences.  I also felt embarrassingly un-woke during a lot of it, so am considerably more humbled than when I started reading.
 
It presents the intertwined stories of twelve black British women, who span the spectrum of blackness as well as feminism and even gender.  Each of their voices are vivid, unique, compelling, all with very different, interesting, relatable lives (even for me, a 62-year-old white woman who identifies as a woman but retains most of her feminist ideals, albeit more muted since I was in college a million years ago).
 
I was struck about halfway through to realize I wasn’t sure if the current strand was about a black or a white person - though the book was about black women and their often-horrific struggles, the universal similarities were pronounced: people struggling with their marriages, their careers, their parents, their children, how they see themselves, how they age.
 
So though it was sobering and humbling, I’m very glad I read it.
 
Buy it on Amazon by clicking here.

#GirlWomanOther #BernardineEvaristo