I could not focus, was it me, was it the book?

One event brings together 12 different women whose stories are interconnected yet all different. Each chapter is dedicated to these stories which shows you what is it like to be a black female in Britain. A unique novel that was enjoyable to read.

Dude, what's with the lack of punctuation? Did quotation marks go up in price?
Otherwise, pretty rocking!

Beautiful, unique, different voices. A nice change from the usual and a very sympathetic telling of their stories.

Ok, so I expected to be in awe of this book, and instead I felt let down. I would not say this is a terribly written book, or that I was bored etc. I would give it 3 stars. My issue was the number of people reading it and raving about it I think impacted on my judgement because I went in thinking this was going to be one of the best books I will read. The book takes us through the lives of a number of women in Britain. Mostly black women who have come from abusive relationships or experienced significant trauma. A number of women identify as LGBTIQ+ and we get to hear the point of view form a person identifying as non-binary. For me, I felt that as soon as I was involved in a story, we were on to the next one and I was forgetting about characters who would then pop up in later stores. I would have preferred say three stories instead of 12 (I think that’s the number). The writing style is quite different i.e. grammar is used differently and at times I enjoyed the unique writing style, and other times I was more focused on that than the story. Overall, not the worst book I have read, but I can’t give it the rave review so many others do.

A very unique book written in a condensed prose with casual punctuation. A character study of young and old black women in all life stages living in Britain. Each chapter tells the depth of a woman’s story and sometimes the characters overlap in future chapters. Once I got used to the writing style, after a few chapters, I grew to love this book. The author has created such a multi-layered look at what it means to be black and British.

As an insight on the lives of Black immigrants to the U.K. over generations, this is an eye-opener. It's also a wonderful treatise on the lives of women, and the culture of London, from the 1950s to the present. Watch this book in the next award round, the Women's Prize for Fiction, 9 September 2020.

Unexpectedly disappointing - more literal than literary, quite spelled-out and heavy-handed. Important content and stories but too simply descriptive.

I had no idea what this book was about when I bought it - just because I was desperate to read something new during COVID! I slowly got into it and ended up really enjoying the whole novel.

The author has a beautiful writing style. I am a grammar nut and even so, the lack of punctuation did not bother me - the sentences were so well constructed that they flowed well and were even designed differently according to their content and the speaker. The other part of her style of jumping from character to character kept me interested, although by the end when some characters were brought back, I had forgotten who they were since there were so many people intertwined together in these stories.

The best thing about this book, I felt, was how the author made you feel like you were living in Britain, knew London well or the smaller towns, and most of all, really got you to feel like you had known these people or people much like them in your life...which I must say, I have! So, I felt very comfortable reading this book and at the same time learned more about the different lifestyles, occupations and social interactions that are out there in the world...awesome!

This book wasn't quite what I expected - a bit more of a collection of disparate character studies, rather than anything more plot-directed, despite the interwoven threads of the character's lives. That interweaving was really intriguing, I love seeing people from different angles and points of view, and the way they crossed and recrossed each others' lives was so well done and fascinating.

There were some content notes I would have appreciated knowing about beforehand, honestly (infidelity, drugs, quite a few sexual violence happenings or references, some of which were handled in such a way that skirted very near triggers for me).

The poetry-prose hybrid style gave it a unique feel. Personally the lack of any full stops anywhere in the book, and the likewise lack of anything to denote beginnings or ends of sentences, made it tiring to read at times. The use of linebreaks midsentence and as a stylistic point was really well done practically everywhere it was used and had a good impact.

I didn't like the book, but it was interesting. I winced through some portions of it (large swathes of Morgan's story, for example) and while sometimes the uncomfortable or bigoted/judgemental views seemed true to characters' perspectives, sometimes there seemed to be something bleeding through from the author's perspective herself.