Hot Milk by Deborah Levy and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Levy’s Hot Milk was published in 2016 and is set in a village on the Spanish coast, where protagonist Sofia lives with her mother Rose. Rose has a strange illness which renders her disabled some of the time, whilst at other times she is perfectly able. Her daughter has brought her to Spain to find a cure for her odd ailment, spending the rest of her time exploring and searching for her own sense of identity. She struggles throughout the novel with her sexuality and sense of self, as well as constant opposition to her needy and controlling mother.

What really struck me was Levy’s dreamlike, hazy and intoxicating writing style. Aside from making you want to go on holiday, the stylish tone of the novel is hypnotic, mesmerising and almost lulls you with its lush descriptions and dreamy quality. In fact, I often felt that I was stuck in an odd dream which I couldn’t wake up from, and the descriptions of the characters were at once vivid and also difficult to pin down. Such an unusual book with not a huge amount of plot but one that I highly enjoyed!

McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing also explores themes of identity and sexuality but in a much more raw, visceral and angry way than Levy’s novel. It reads almost like stream-of-consciousness, which I’m usually not a fan of, but this is more of an incoherent word-vomit of pain, anger and hurt from our unfortunate protagonist. Struggling with the news that her brother is terminally ill with a brain tumour, as well as exploring her sexuality in harmful and self-destructive ways, our vulnerable narrator is someone who you just want to pick up and give a cuddle.

We really get to delve inside the head of the unnamed narrator, who presents us with an interior monologue which is erratic, plagued with pain and self-loathing, and utterly laid bare. At times this is extremely difficult to read and I wouldn’t recommend it for the faint-hearted or easily triggered, as there is quite a lot of abuse and violence in this book. And yet McBride somehow turns it into a form of fractured, emotionally-draining poetry.