A review by theycallmelech
The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera

3.0

When I got past awing over the prose, I quickly got exhausted by Vera analysing every action to death, but also somehow skirting around the materiality of the story, only talking about the characters in meta-symbolic terms. And then, when I was just about to give up from sheer headache, the characters started narrating the story. So now I'm here, frustrated with how I feel about this book, because on one hand I enjoyed Vera's beautiful writing, but on the other, I wish she had weaved it into the story more seamlessly, rather than splitting the book into one half drowning poetry, one half fiction. The disconnect between the two parts only gave me little time to discern and comprehend the defining events of the novel, and gave me no time to care about the sisterhood between Thenjiwe and Nonceba.