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But the Girl

‘A wonderful new novel’ Brandon Taylor

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But the Girl

By: Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
Narrated by: Nikita Waldron
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Summary

 'I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals - that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me.'

Girl is spending the summer at an artist's residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knit Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a 'postcolonial novel'? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity but learning to understand the people who shaped you? Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction
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I struggled with this book. Loved everything she wrote about her family but found so much of the rest tedious. Maybe I’m just too old for it! Realised about halfway it could actually be the narration I disliked, not the book itself. As an avid Audible listener, this is the first time this has happened to me and it’s thrown me a little.

Interesting in parts

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