'Girl' by Edna O'Brien

Rating: 10 out of 10

Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43565316-girl

Buy Link: https://www.waterstones.com/book/girl/edna-obrien/9780571341184

Author Link: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7184.Edna_O_Brien

Goodreads blurb:

“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.

FTC disclaimer: I was not sent this product. I am not affiliated with the companies mentioned. All opinions are my own.

Review written on 15/06/2021

After having read this book in two days, I have no words, but I will do my best to write!

Firstly, please read this novel! The pace does not slow, it will make you think, make you grateful, its images will stay in your mind, and you will find yourself bringing it up in conversation because O’Brien has, in ‘Girl’’, written a masterpiece.

O’Brien’s brutal, yet unadorned, un-lingering, and almost clinical prose is the vehicle for her phenomenal exploration of the terrorist camps in North Eastern Nigeria. Although we follow one fictional girl’s experience, the book is clearly inspired by nauseating true stories, which makes the novel even more important to read.

The constant changes in tense from present to past do well to bring even more chaos to the narrative, and to highlight specific passages. Description and action blur into each other, everything detailed so that the camp, the city, and each village all took immovable residence in my mind.

‘Girl’ felt like the combination of a haunting dystopia (in parts, it reminded me of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’), and a medieval story (the latter because of the blatant disregard for human life and rights that is chronicled). For example, we are forced to hear the “victorious yells of […] executioners” who stone a wife in the camp accused of adultery till “Strips of the other side of her jaw [come] hanging off”, and her head is removed. Or I could tell you about a “pit” of “old people […] pleading for their lives” as it is “covered”, and “horses [are] led on top” and “made to prance.”. The fact that events similar to these are unfolding in the present day is a hard, yet important pill to swallow.

Our protagonist sees things in a stark, and disturbingly childlike manner. She remarks that her and her friends being raped are “Quiet as corpses.”. She then merely “watch[es] the flies on that stinking ceiling, convening around the dead ones.”. These simple yet brutal observations that litter the novel reminded me of ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue, and they served to emphasise how Maryam’s trauma deadens a vital part of her.

Despite the fact that we are flung to the bowels of humanity for the majority of this book, by the end, we have hope.

More quotations:

• “We would have cut our own throats if we had knives.”

• “Then two men wheeled on a table and set it down in the middle of the compound, while a third man put a white plastic bucket underneath it. Only seconds passed but we guessed.”

• “Some were complaining because the placenta had stuck. They were starving. I saw them tear it out in pieces and then sit on the floor and eat it.”