Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

 Saturday, Apr. 23, 2020--San Antonio

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo confused me at first.  There is no capitalization except for formal terms/names and no punctuation except for commas.  So a line would start with a lower-case letter, then after the last word of the sentence, there would be a big blank space before there would be more words with the first one starting with a lower-case letter.  My first thought was whether the Kindle version I was reading was corrupted with missing portions not downloaded.  But soon, I figured out the pattern--short indentations for starting a new paragraph or what would be quoted text (no quotation marks) by a different character.  Then reading it flowed easily.  The book, which won the Booker Prize in 2019, became a fascinating story which concentrates on telling the lives of many connected characters both in the present and over multiple generations.  Most of the characters are immigrants or children of immigrants of African descent from either Africa or the Caribbean who are now living or have lived in England, some in London and some in the Newcastle area.  Most of the main characters are women, and most of those are involved some how in the women's liberation movement.  Several of the women have married white men or are the children or light-skinned descendants of one or more interracial marriages.  The book is much like reading short stories of the lives of these various women, but the book as a whole eventually ties them all together in various ways.  As the reader, once I understood this aspect of the book, I started trying to figure out the relationship before it was revealed and if I couldn't, I became eager to get far enough for the relationship to be revealed so that the puzzle (of the connection[s] to others already introduced) would become clearer.  Even toward the end when I though I was reading the last chapter of the book where many of the presently living characters come together, there follows a short epilogue that ties several more of them together.  It's a good book, I gave it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.