A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

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WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE

KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR AWARD

WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE

Eimear McBride's award-winning debut novel tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. It is a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. To read A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world at first hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation.

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Library Journal Review

The heroine of McBride's remarkable debut novel, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, is angry, flippant, rebellious, tender, promiscuous, hungry, risk-embracing, lonely, confused, desperate, caring, and wholly unsupported by those around her. She's every young woman trying to find herself in an unwelcoming world and very specifically a sister contending with a brain-damaged brother, particularly difficult because she is younger, unable to protect him, and flooded by the fallout-a situation too little explored in literature. But as the narrative makes clear, her anguish is multiplied by the classic visitation of brutality and small-mindedness from grandfather to daughter to granddaughter, and one begins to understand why this girl (like so many others) is half-formed. And about that narrative: one often reads that a novelist's style is unique, but this is the rare case when that's actually true. The language moves in fits and starts, with incomplete sentences and stuttering phrases that capture the narrator's inner turmoil, her never being able quite to articulate what she's thinking or feeling (because who's listening?): "You said it is like nothing at all. It must be something what? And words, trace stammer of." Throughout, she addresses her brother in the second person, ever trying to connect; over-the-top behavior and brutal sex are means not of losing herself but of feeling herself there. Verdict This book will confound readers who like their text traditional, but it's addictive and flowing and works perfectly to capture a heroine whose voice we need to hear.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Growing up in a poor backwater town in Ireland, the narrator of McBride's powerful debut novel, dark horse winner of the Baileys Women's Prize, was closely attached to her older brother, both of them in league against their volatile mother. Shortly before the narrator's birth, however, an invasive tumor had been removed from her brother's brain, causing him to be developmentally "slow" and leaving him with a livid scar on his head and a prominent limp. The prose is permeated with imagery that convey the squalid conditions of their existence. Their father has flown, and their mother alternates between obsessive prayer and screaming rants threatening hell for impiety. The narration is written in a Joycean stream of consciousness with an Irish lilt, and sentence fragments transmit the pervasive sense of urgency, of thoughts spinning faster than the tongue can speak. When she is 13, the narrator is raped by her uncle, and the relationship continues after the narrator leaves home for college in the city. By this point she recognizes the dark streak in her nature that treats sex as punishment. She welcomes her uncle's continuing predation, which fuels her promiscuity. Her voice reaches to an anguished pitch when her brother's tumor returns; she feels guilt at having left him to cope with her mother's religious mania. Some readers may be turned off at this point, depressed by the deathbed vigil or the narrator's inevitable breakdown, but those who persevere will have read an unforgettable novel. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

A fresh, emotionally raw debut fromIrish-born, U.K.-based author McBride.Written in halting sentences,half-sentences and dangling clauses that tumble through the text like fleeting,undigested thoughts, the story follows the female narrator as she navigates anabusive upbringingphysical, sexual and psychologicaland the lingering effectsof her brother's early childhood brain trauma. McBride opens with the youngnarrator in the hospital with her mother and brother, who is undergoing surgery("You white-faced feel the needle go in. Feel fat juicy poison poison young boyskin. In your arteries. Eyeballs. Spine hands legs. Puke it cells up all daylong. No Mammy don't let them"). From there, the author follows her protagonistthrough her confused, angry adolescence, which is exacerbated by her mother'spiercing Irish-Catholic piety, and examines her struggle between appeasing herfamily and developing her own identity. Though the structure and events areroughly chronological and conventionalchildhood; adolescence andexperimentation with sex, drugs and alcohol; further confusing and liberatingexperiences in college; the deaths of loved onesthe style is anything but.McBride calls to mind both Joyce and Stein in her syntax and mechanics, but shebrings her own emotional range to the table, as well. As readers, we burrowdeep within the narrator's brain as she battles to mature into a well-balancedadult amid her chaotic surroundings. In an uncomfortable but always eye-openingtale, McBride investigates the tensions among family, love, sex and religion.Lovers of straightforward storytelling will shirk, but open-minded readers(specifically those not put off by the unusual language structure) will besurprised, moved and awed by this original novel.McBride's debut garnered theinaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the Baileys Women's Prize for fiction in2014and deservedly so. This is exhilarating fiction from a voice to watch. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.