A review by juneuk
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

My lack of rating for this book is simply because I cannot make my mind up about it. Reading the reviews here, my feeling swings widly between 'it's the best; groundbreaking, genius, prose-as poetry etc etc', and 'it's the worst; harrowing,too-clever, impenetrable..'and so forth. I will say that as a rule I detest 'stream-of -consciousness' as a style. I only read this book because it won the Bailey's Prize and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I almost gave up at times until I 'got my ear in'so to speak and the sense of the thing began to show itself.But that was also when the sheer horror of the situation emerged;the broken relationships, the degradation and , at times, the sexual violence.
I don't regret having read this- I cried,I was shocked, and sometimes I was dazzled, but I was never unmoved...