Girl - Edna O'Brian

"I was a girl once, but not anymore. So begins Girl, Edna O'Brien's
harrowing portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood."

This was a disappointing book. One that I really wanted to learn from and was expecting to enjoy due to the large amount of critical attention that this book has garnered. I really need to stop trusting Literary awards. 

One struggle I was not expecting to have with this book was with O'Brien's prose, but that actually ended up being one of the main issues for me. Structurally it left a lot to be desired; every time a new character was introduced, Maryam's first-person narration would be interrupted, and we would switch to an italicized segment, also first-person, where the character would narrate their life story for several pages. It felt like the linguistic equivalent of flashbacks. 

This is a pretty petty way to say that I was baffled by how bad the prose was. While I do kind of see why she chose to switch between tenses (it does add to the feeling of a fractured state of mind her protagonist has), overall I found this choice clumsy and the writing lacking.

There's a lot more that didn't work for me: the pace of the first half of the novel hurtled by at breakneck speed as if it were running through a checklist of every horror imaginable, and the second half slowed to such a standstill that all potential momentum was lost. I felt absolutely emotionally numb and disconnected reading this, which is particularly noteworthy given how graphic it is (trigger warnings for everything imaginable apply). The exploration of trauma only ever felt surface-level; all I ever really learned about Maryam was about her identity as a mother.  The more I read the less I understood O'Brien's aims with this book. Thus I am left having reading about the worse of human experience, yet I didn't feel anything. I didn't learn anything new and I was never drawn into the story emotionally. Disappointing to say the least. 

Age Rating 18+. Rape, stoning, involuntary pregnancy, horrifying birthing scene, humiliation, exorcism and pretty much everything you can imagine.