A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

The heroine of McBride's remarkable debut novel, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, is angry, flippant, rebellious, tender, promiscuous, hungry, risk-embracing, lonely, confused, desperate, caring, and wholly unsupported by those around her. She's every young woman trying to find herself in an unwelcoming world and very specifically a sister contending with a brain-damaged brother, particularly difficult because she is younger, unable to protect him, and flooded by the fallout—a situation too little explored in literature. But as the narrative makes clear, her anguish is multiplied by the classic visitation of brutality and small-mindedness from grandfather to daughter to granddaughter, and one begins to understand why this girl (like so many others) is half-formed. And about that narrative: one often reads that a novelist's style is unique, but this is the rare case when that's actually true. The language moves in fits and starts, with incomplete sentences and stuttering phrases that capture the narrator's inner turmoil, her never being able quite to articulate what she's thinking or feeling (because who's listening?): "You said it is like nothing at all. It must be something what? And words, trace stammer of." Throughout, she addresses her brother in the second person, ever trying to connect; over-the-top behavior and brutal sex are means not of losing herself but of feeling herself there.