Coffee House Press

227 pages, $24

Review by Brynne Rebele-Henry

Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is a runic chant for every woman, girl, and infant who has ever been born. McBride’s language is sexual, primitive, almost Stonehenge-like in its spacing and punctuation. The words pound against the page in a style that brings to mind the innermost working of organs in the human body, the language a jumbled elemental call for blood, desolate in its beauty, the prose reminiscent of a desert at four in the morning:

For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.

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