Girl, Woman, Other

It's a polyphonic collection of 12 short, loosely interconnected stories of Black, British women ranging in age from 19 to 93. We've got Amma hitting the big time with a play opening at The National after years of scrappy outsider productions. Her daughter Yazz pushes up against her mother's brand of Boomer feminism with her own rules and concerns. Dominique enters into a lesbian relationship and is quickly skirted away to a “wimmin's commune” and we even have a Black British farmer. I appreciate the representation, certainly at this moment it feels all the more important to have a book wholly dedicated to these voices. In hindsight the dual Booker manages to balance Atwood's brand of white feminism against Evaristo's Black and Intersectional feminism.

I enjoyed the collection and seeing the connections however slight as it is bookended by Amma's play “The Last Amazon of Dahomey.” It doesn't really resolve any larger narrative tension when it finishes but collectively the stories work together to paint a rich world with characters we don't often see on the page.