RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksGirl treats bodily decay and the extreme stress it places on a family without the triumphalism of many survivor memoirs...Instead, Girl’s narrator processes her brother’s illness by shaping the forceful reactions that she experiences in her mind and body into fragmented shards of language that mirror the extremity of her pain … What is fascinating here, and what should induct the novel into a more enduring canon of women’s writing, is that McBride never self-censors when engaging with the pain, the abjection, and the desperation generated out of situations in which a woman is granted little more than her body and her words to use as weapons within imbalanced power structures.
