An extraordinary, unusual and captivating novel way unlike anything I have ever read. It is difficult, both to read and to handle; but it is great. It is, of course, a story about a girl and then her as a young woman, and her brother. Their mother also is significant. ( )

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing reads like Eimear McBride wrote the whole thing as a stream of consciousness, hung it on the wall and then fired full stops at it from a sawn-off shotgun. The whole thing is riddled with randomly-placed periods that defy the reader's attempt to engage in the story. Frequently there are three or more periods in what would scan as a normal sentence, ripping your attention back into the mechanics of reading rather than enjoying the novel. Some people can get past this kind of writing; I couldn't.

If the above is no hurdle for you, the novel tells an affecting tale about a young Irish girl growing up with her seriously ill brother and religious single mother. Serious mis-steps during her teens turn her into a promiscuous rebel and sadly weakens her relationship with her brother and mother. A family crisis occurs that brings the conflict to a head.

Some of the writing is quite musical and the story is interesting enough but, as I said above, McBride has vandalised her own novel by making it as difficult as possible for the reader to engage with her characters and their lives. Too much artifice has killed the art. ( )

This book left me gasping. I am not sure I can even rate it to be honest. I can't really say I enjoyed it. But at the same time, the last chapter was so powerful and emotional that I also cannot bring myself to give it a low rating. It's literary, but not beautifully written. It's frustrating, but not boring. It's honestly not quite like any other book I've read; if nothing else, it is original.

If I had gone into reading this book with some expectations, I think it would have been better. So in case you are feeling daring, here's what I might like to have known going in.

1. This is experimental fiction and written in a most challenging voice. And I never really quite got the whole hang of it after 200 pages. It was almost how I might imagine reading in a second language would be if I chose a book that was too hard for my fluency level. I got a lot of it. But I didn't get it all. Hoping it will dissipate as the book goes on? Know that it doesn't. Some reviewers call it "stream of consciousness", but I can tell you that I don't talk like this book does inside my own head. It is all from one perspective, but it is more muddled.

2. The book is dark, dark, dark. It has repeated instances of sexual violence, yet the way the scenes are written, they are more emotionally impactful as opposed to truly graphic. Your own mind fills in the blanks. It was darker than [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1439197219s/6288.jpg|3355573] or [b:A Little Life|22822858|A Little Life|Hanya Yanagihara|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1446469353s/22822858.jpg|42375710]. Be prepared.

3. The book is short in terms of page length, but it doesn't read short. It really requires concentration.

All in all, I think as I look back, this book will be one that I will never forget. It is also one I will never go around recommending. The audience for a book like this one seems pretty narrow to me, but I can also see it being the type of book that makes the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list.

Readers, you've been forewarned. I'm still a little breatheless. ( )

A young Irish girl narrates a heartbreaking, furious story of abuse, cruelty and grief in an unusual style. I found A Girl is a Half-formed Thing an incredibly difficult read, even while I admired the author's chutzpah in breaking all the conventions of language by writing it the way she did - a sort of stuttering, angry stream of consciousness.

It's a compelling story when you get used to the style, but it's unremittingly bleak and hard to stomach in places. This is not a story with hope at its centre

Like most people in the UK at least, I'm not in the best headspace on this 96,467th day of January in a pandemic under an inept far right-wing government, and this novel was probably the exact opposite of what I needed to read. But I had to read it for my master's degree, and I'm certainly interested to see what the discussion of the novel is like. ( )

Unrelentingly dark.
Unique writing style took a few chapters to get used to before I stopped noticing it, swept away in the beauty of it.
Damn 'literary fiction' and the motherfucking Catholics. ( )