Girl, Woman, Other

    This book was a struggle for me.  My friend, Terri, had the book recommended to her and she persevered, knowing that it would be a stretch. She ended up feeling that it was a brilliant piece of writing.
   On the other hand,  I struggled through, never seeing the brilliance.
  I had read that it was "a paean to what it means to be black, British and female".  That really appealed to me.  I really never wondered about black women's lives in England today and thought it would be good to get that perspective.
  I also read this advertisement for the book: 'a polyphonic choir of women, singing a song of life in dissonances and harmonies.'  Actually, I liked the write-ups about the book better than the book.
   It is a book about 12 women - a chapter for each one.  Many of the women are rebellious and angry.  As the women are struggling agains the norms of society, the author is struggling against the norms of writing prose: sentence structure, punctuation.
Sample:
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Penelope's parents were dull and dispassionate automatons crawling towards their deaths
   she wrote in her diary at the age of fourteen
   it was unfortunate
   because she herself was brimming with vivacity and racing towards a marvellous life that stretched gloriously ahead of her
   as she also wrote
   in her diary
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      Well, maybe it is the teacher in me, but I really didn't enjoy this book like others did.  The book won the Booker Prize in 2019 and it also was on Barack Obama's list of favourite books for 2019.  Love Barack Obama!