The Other Woman

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I love love loved to hate these characters - they are nutty in the best way possible. They were truly driving Holly and myself bananas the whole read, and that is the best kind of character for me. If you can create a vivid response from me, whether positive or negative, then job well done!

The characters in this book are fantastic, some you will love to hate and there are some you will love. I love when an Author can pull of characters that readers love to hate. I think that is a gift and, in this book, made the book even more enjoyable. Talking about enjoyable, I enjoyed this book from beginning to end but that ending.... Read and find out! Other reviewers are recommending going into this book blind with only the brief synopsis to light your way. I agree with this approach.The man I fictionalise as Tom Ryan got newspaper headlines, hours of courtroom time, people prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt – and one hundred years later, it’s still too often the male perpetrators of abuse that news report focus on; it’s their stories that we read. Evaristo shows women as social climbers, single mothers, sourvivors of abuse, victims of sexism and racism, lovers, wives, widows, daughters, grandmothers, VPs, teachers, cleaning women, artists, college students, school dropouts, immigrants and the children of immigrants, and in many other roles - but all of her characters are fighters, in their very own way. Usually, I love polyphonic novels - my favorite book of 2018 was There There, which also features 12 protagonists - but over long passages of Evaristo's effort, I was rather bored and felt disaffected: The relentlessly descriptive re-tellings of whole life stories plus the additive effect of the strict, enumerative structure feels exhausting (we are introduced to one character after the other, then there's an end where they meet and an epilogue), and the narrative intent, while important, always remains visible - this prose does not carry its readers away with emotion or urgency.

A final epilogue reveals a final link via an examination of hybridity of origins and finishes with the quote with which I open my review. Evaristo is 61 years old and has already published 8 novels, winning the Man Booker with this one. It rankles me that I only heard of her after the Booker Prize win. She is also quite simply the most dynamic and remarkable woman I wish I knew growing up. Pammie was trying to drive Emily away to protect her. Pammie had seen Adam kill his previous fiance and knew he was a psychopath. She didn’t go to the police because Adam had seen her kill her abusive husband when Adam was a child. The Ending:when my enby child gave me a copy I was additionally wary of its physical heft and minimal punctuation: Thank you so much to Netgalley and St. Martins/Minotaur books for the opportunity to read this in exchange for my honest review.