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Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.
~Trigger Warnings: domestic abuse; affairs; gang rape; corporal punishment; manipulation~
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo is a collection of stories following the lives of twelve black people from England. Inspired by her own experiences of race, religion, gender and sexuality, we follow these characters as they navigate their life and the world they live in. with all their lives somehow intertwined, the reader hops from person to person, fully immersing themselves in the perspectives presented.
With the book being primarily set in England (with a few lives continuing in America), the reader gets an insight into how everyday racism affects black people in Britain and the relationship between black people and Britain’s history. Despite being made up characters, the background is far from fictional.
One of the key themes in this book is feminism, what it means to be a woman, and how intersectionality plays out. With the characters varied in age, this on-going open conversation about feminism, sexuality and race permeates the novel and forces the reader to think about these themes in the wider context. The book deals with topics of rape, views women have of each other, feminism within lesbian relationships and how men and transgender people play a part in this whole conversation.
This book was a huge eye-opener for me. As someone who praises themselves on the fact they read a lot of black, queer, feminist authors, this book absolutely blew me away. I was in constant shock as the lack of barriers the author placed on talking about culture, identity and expression. Not once did I feel like the author was holding back. This raw, innate writing was so refreshing and reminded me of Brandon Taylor’s Real Life. I am genuinely itching to read another book by Evaristo as I crave the characters she creates and her descriptions of the world we live in. The lens she views the world in are new to me and I can only thank her for writing about these perspectives.
A huge positive I found within this book, like my point above, is how she doesn’t gloss over certain topics or present the black life as the best life. She acknowledges that lesbians can be equally as toxic as men. She acknowledges that affairs happen in black marriages, that some black people conform to a certain stereotype, that some black people can fight against these stereotypes. Unlike other writes of the 21st century who write about women and black people, Evaristo whole-heartedly makes her characters flawed. There is no superiority in her characters or god-like descriptions.
In conclusion, if you loved Real Life or Out of Love, two best-selling novels of 2020, this book is definitely for you. The complexity of characters and the depth of themes and conversations the books deal with will not only stay with you for life, but educate you on matters of feminism and racism that perhaps female-protagonist fantasy novels don’t quite achieve.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
You can purchase this book from:
Amazon US here.
Amazon UK here.