A girl is a half-formed thing by Eimear McBride

—BUS RIDING BOOKS—
"A girl is a half-formed thing" by Eimear McBride
Here is my review of the book…

It's not often that I pick a book purely based on its side story, not knowing anything about the actual storyline. This is what I did with this book though. I read an article in the New Yorker explaining how it got published after nine years of rejection and how it has since won multiple awards. I was hooked straight away, it had to be good, there was no other way.

I listened to the audio book version, read by the author. Sure, I liked her voice, but the book not so much. It's interesting to think how a book in print is all silence until it becomes alive and loud in the reader's head (or not) while an audio book is all noise to your ears from page 1. The story comes to you without effort, you don't have to go and grab it from the pages of the book sitting on your lap while on the bus or hung in the air while lying on the beach. Does that make an audio book any less interesting or enjoyable? I don't think so. If anything, it's effortless like watching a movie. And it's probably the best litmus test for the worthiness of any book. For aspiring authors are often advised to "show, not tell". They need to answer this crucial question: "Would this sentence, paragraph, page be visible on the screen?", "What would this chapter look like if it was turned into a movie?"

I might be wrong but "A girl is a half-formed thing" might actually be difficult to turn into a movie. Unnamed characters, no sign of when it takes place. All we know is that it's set in Ireland, "this country is awful in the winter", there is lots of Christian songs singing and it's yet another account of the life of a dysfunctional family and the hypocrisy that follows ("Your bloody father is dead and gone", and then "My family is all love", mum said. I ask her: "All love, seriously?").

Lesson learnt: pick a book because you like its story, its characters, not because it won awards after being rejected over and over again for so many years.

O.V.