I keep reading about Girl, Women, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo. And, it won the Booker Prize in 2019. However, I struggled to get through the beginning. For one, there were no periods to end or caps to begin sentences. So, the editor in me hated that. And, just as each story got going, it ended and a new character who had been featured earlier, was introduced. While I sometimes like that in stories, in this one, it made the book feel disjointed. Whenever I look frequently at the % I have read, I know I don’t love a book. However, there were parts and sections I really liked. “The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London’s funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley’s former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole’s mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter’s lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.” (Amazon) Overall, while I ended up liking parts of this book and I really liked the ending and epilogue, as a whole, I didn’t love it.
