The nameless protagonist, haunted by a trauma I won’t spoil here, offers consistently sharp and often melancholic treatments of contemporary existence: the theater of joy and disappointment represented by text messages, say, or the depressive signifiers of corporate office life. Watson depicts her protagonist’s consciousness by way of striking formal structures, using typographical tricks to illustrate the cacophonous complexity of inner life ... While this could be distracting, or even indulgent, in lesser hands, Watson’s experiments serve to both deepen our immersion and reify the buried pain at the novel’s center ... I was reminded of the experimental English novelist B. S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal, with its adventurous typography marking the convulsions, stutters and silences of the mind (albeit the geriatric variety). Little Scratch absorbs the more fragmented forms of attention and makes of them something rich, assured and sad.

Believe me when I tell you, Little Scratch is difficult. It will tax you. You will have to learn the syntax of a distracted and distressed mind. But rigor, in this case, is not without reward ... While the story line is simple, Watson’s style is experimental, and revelations about what horrors the unnamed main character has endured trickle, like droplets from a leaky faucet, until the pool of her trauma is made apparent. The writing is stream of consciousness and has the trappings of a narrative poem ... I may be making this novel sound cheerless. That couldn’t be further from the truth. One benefit of spending 200-odd pages in one character’s head is that we get to savor her idiosyncrasies, stray thoughts and offhand insights ... Much like the quiet triumph you might feel once you’ve convinced a closed-off person to unfurl, to get comfortable, to reveal intimacies, there’s a certain satisfaction to learning that she’s an aspiring writer, thinks about sex on the train and is wrestling with a consuming secret ... Granted, the style can occasionally grate on the nerves ... I suggest you soldier on. Despite the occasional overuse of repetition, the writing is economical. It’s a quick read. It takes a regular day and renders it irregularly, interestingly. It presents grief, violence, self-harm and self-doubt in an unusual fashion, driving home just how disorienting and destabilizing these forces can be. It is of the #MeToo era, tackling both catcallers and unrepentant predators, but exists on a plane all its own.

The typographical form of her account suggests that of a poem, or maybe a spreadsheet with intersecting rows and columns. It takes a while to get acclimated to the pattern, but once you get it, you’ll find yourself flowing right into the narrator’s troubled skin, living her simultaneity of sense experience and discursive thought ... her investigation into her own situation is rigorous. But her wry introspection keeps us wondering: will she circle her experience without reaching its center, or is she zeroing in on it? ... The beauty of Little Scratch lies not only in its fresh prose and innovative form. Rebecca Watson leads us to trust or to doubt—depending on the reader, I suppose—that her narrator will get to where she needs to be. Resisting moralizing as well as the closure of redemption or despair, Ms. Watson leaves this a hard-won place too personal, too individual to be prescribed. She achieves this with a richly articulated point of view.

If good writing has the capacity to make the reader feel something, then Rebecca Watson’s debut novel certainly deserves to be praised. The reading experience is intense and visceral – through Watson’s inventive style and linguistic flair the reader may literally find themselves fighting the itch along with the book’s unnamed narrator ... To quote from the book like this does a disservice to the formal style employed by Watson on the page. Line breaks, blank spaces, time stamping in bold, fragmented passages and epeated words are just some of the ways the author arranges her text to convey the thoughts of her character. Underneath is a story of trauma and the strange ways in which a mind works to help a person through the darkest times ... Tackling traumatic subject matter in a defiantly playful format, Little Scratch is a thought-provoking and original debut from a writer not afraid to push boundaries. If style is what makes an author distinctive, Watson will stand out among her peers for her experimentation with text and formatting ... at once a simple and onerous task: the timespan is relatively easy to structure, but to capture the hundreds of thousands of thoughts a person might have over a given day, and to mould them into a coherent novel, is a form of art ... There is a Prufrock-esque quality.

... feels voyeuristically close ... sounds like a tiring read, but the rhythm is engaging and the voice instantly recognisable ... A large part of the story takes place in the office, and while this microcosmic world of logging on and showing up was contemporary at the time of writing, it feels somewhat dated after the unusual year that was 2020 ... These instances provide wider, though nuanced, context, on the toll that such interactions — the smiles, nods, unsolicited comments — take on daily life, particularly that of a woman, and how hard this can be to articulate to someone who hasn’t experienced them ... Many books dealing with a subject as serious as Watson’s hold their readers firmly within an atmosphere of pain, but here, the instances of playful rage, frustration and knowing cynicism neatly reveal that horror and humour need not be mutually exclusive. There is power in the narrator’s vulnerability, in her multitudes colliding, in the casual digressions, in the joy she finds through simple things.

Watson experiments with line breaks, repetition, and columns to express the unnamed narrator’s frenetic consciousness over a single day in this inventive, immersive debut ... Watson’s clever convention and set pieces are not simply flourishes but integral to the plot and themes. There’s much relatable humor in the heroine’s everyday snafus, such as her struggle for coherence while speaking with a male colleague, and a tedious task with a glue stick, the low point of her workday ... the last third of the novel becomes genuinely harrowing and unsettling. Watson’s haunting, virtuosic performance is well worth a look.

... an unusual reading experience which relates both the mundane (every drip of the narrator's morning shower, every step of her commute) and the revelatory ... the outrages of the everyday—a dissonant now that cannot be silenced or slowed. A daring book whose innovations are balanced by the sad familiarity of its pain.