A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing - Review

As usual, when I got home from work and saw a package with my name on it, I was very excited.  "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing" had arrived.  Anyone who loves books knows that thrill of knowing you have something new to read.

I chose to read "A Girl is a Half Formed Thing" is the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother.  Their relationship starts even before the girl is born, and is shaped largely around her brothers childhood brain tumor.

Amazon describes it as a book that: "...tells the story of a young girl’s devastating adolescence as she and her brother, who suffers from a brain tumor, struggle for a semblance of normalcy in the shadow of sexual abuse, denial, and chaos at home. Plunging readers inside the psyche of a girl isolated by her own dangerously confusing sexuality, pervading guilt, and unrelenting trauma...."

I thought I could get into the story so I opened the book and started reading.

"For you.  You'll soon.  You'll give her name.  in the stitches of her skin she'll wear you say."

My brow crinkled up.  I skimed the page to see more of the same.  And the next page.  And the next.

Surely the whole book can't be written like this I thought.  I opened to a random page towards the middle.

"Sister be a brother sister fixer of her woes.  Am I like that?  Am I that thing it seems yes.  So ho ho on the phone."

And another random page,

"Hands are.  Greasy with old or.  They come.  Here are two.  Two with them with cans or them six-pack."

So, okay, the whole book is written like that.

I have to say I TRIED to read the book.  I really tried.  I put HOURS into reading the first 42 pages of this 229 page book.  I had to re-read and re-read and re-read parts to even begin to understand what was happening.  I'm still not sure if I was understanding some of the scenes properly.

I very rarely dislike a book so much that I don't finish reading it.  I have forced myself to the ends of some horrible things, but 42 pages was all of this I could take.  I simply could not keep going.

That's not to say that this is a BAD book.  It has won multiple awards, so it must be a good book in literary terms. But as a casual reader of fiction just for the joy of reading and I see why it took Eimear McBride almost a decade to get it published (as the back cover of the novel says)

I have to give "A girl is a half formed thing." Just one star.

I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review.

The Book of Strange New Things - a Review

"Harrowing, wrenching...
bold and unexpected work of beauty."
--The New Republic

I read all kinds of books.  Of course I like some genre's more than others.  And when I read a genre I expect a certain kind of writing.  When I read a Science Fiction novel, I don't want a lot of techno-babble.  Whether it is in the future, in outer space, in another dimension, I don't care.  I don't want the story to be overshadowed by talk of flux capacitors or the physics of warp drives.

Similarly when I read a Christian themed novel I don't want God shoved down my throat every other sentence.  I know plenty of faith filled people in the world, and most of them do decided whether to go to the bathroom or not without asking God if its okay first.

When I picked The Book of Strange New Things off of Blogging For Books I realized it was a twofer.  It was a Christian Science Fiction Novel, and realized that chances were good that it would not meet both of my criteria.

The Book of Strange New Things follows a pastor named Peter, who decides to leave behind his wife, Bea, and his cat Joshua to work as a missionary.

Instead of traveling to a different country or Continent, Peter is traveling to another PLANET.

A mega-corporation known as  USIC  (if its known at all) found him perfect for the mission.  They needed a preacher because the native population of the planet demanded one.

Once he is on the planet, farther away from home than he ever thought possible he finds out he has the most easy missionary job ever.  The population is STARVING for the Word of God.  They call the Bible their "Book of Strange New Things."  Even the ones who are not converted don't give him a hard time.

Then he begins to get news from Bea about a world which is becoming more and more devastated.  He feels apart and disconnected from the tragedies of Earth, and eventually finds a gulf of more than dimensional space growing between him and his beloved Bea.

It was a good novel.  Emotional in parts, but not very thrilling.  The more I read the more I kept expecting the natives to be different than they seemed to be.

The back of the novel cover talks about a "population struggling with a dangerous illness" and I kept waiting for that to show up too.

As far as meeting my criteria...Peter is a layperson not a scientist.  That makes him different than the rest of the population on the planet.  While the characters in the background sometimes talk of techinical things its only mentioned in the passing through Peters POV.

Then there was the Christian part.  Of course, when the bulk of the book is about a Christian Missionary bringing the Gospel to aliens on another planet, you expect there will be more God-talk than in a novel about (for example) a religious private detective.  I appreciate that the preaching was left mostly to the scenes with the natives and not so much Peter trying to convert the other humans in the settlement.

Parts of the book were written using the "letters" of the natives as Peter tries to learn the language.  Towards the very end of the book he gives them a speech using ONLY their own language.  That was a bit annoying to me.  I have no idea what he said to his flock in that scene, and it was never translated for the reader.

And Peter himself seemed a little more self-centered than I would imagine a Missionary to be.  He didn't try very hard to interact with the humans, even the ones who clearly needed him.  And in his letters to Bea he comes across as only wanting to talk about himself, but not even really wanted to do that. Her missives to him are long and full of info.  His letters to her are mostly just a few lines long and usually telling her to pray or turn to God (when she clearly wanted support from her husband no matter how far away he was.)

More interesting are the letters that Peter gets from Bea.  Normally I hate when a book switches POV from one character to another, but I wanted to see more of what was going on on Earth.  We got tidbits from Bea, but not enough.

I have a feeling that if I had seen more of the book from Bea's POV on earth I might have been more likely to give it a full 5 stars.

As it was I give this novel 4 out of 5 stars.  It could have been more thrilling, but it never promised to be a Thriller.  And it made me read for 3 hours straight near the end because I HAD to know how it ended.