The heroine of McBride's remarkable debut novel, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, is angry, flippant, rebellious, tender, promiscuous, hungry, risk-embracing, lonely, confused, desperate, caring, and wholly unsupported by those around her. She's every young woman trying to find herself in an unwelcoming world and very specifically a sister contending with a brain-damaged brother, particularly difficult because she is younger, unable to protect him, and flooded by the fallout-a situation too little explored in literature. But as the narrative makes clear, her anguish is multiplied by the classic visitation of brutality and small-mindedness from grandfather to daughter to granddaughter, and one begins to understand why this girl (like so many others) is half-formed. And about that narrative: one often reads that a novelist's style is unique, but this is the rare case when that's actually true. The language moves in fits and starts, with incomplete sentences and stuttering phrases that capture the narrator's inner turmoil, her never being able quite to articulate what she's thinking or feeling (because who's listening?): "You said it is like nothing at all. It must be something what? And words, trace stammer of." Throughout, she addresses her brother in the second person, ever trying to connect; over-the-top behavior and brutal sex are means not of losing herself but of feeling herself there. Verdict This book will confound readers who like their text traditional, but it's addictive and flowing and works perfectly to capture a heroine whose voice we need to hear.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Growing up in a poor backwater town in Ireland, the narrator of McBride's powerful debut novel, dark horse winner of the Baileys Women's Prize, was closely attached to her older brother, both of them in league against their volatile mother. Shortly before the narrator's birth, however, an invasive tumor had been removed from her brother's brain, causing him to be developmentally "slow" and leaving him with a livid scar on his head and a prominent limp. The prose is permeated with imagery that convey the squalid conditions of their existence. Their father has flown, and their mother alternates between obsessive prayer and screaming rants threatening hell for impiety. The narration is written in a Joycean stream of consciousness with an Irish lilt, and sentence fragments transmit the pervasive sense of urgency, of thoughts spinning faster than the tongue can speak. When she is 13, the narrator is raped by her uncle, and the relationship continues after the narrator leaves home for college in the city. By this point she recognizes the dark streak in her nature that treats sex as punishment. She welcomes her uncle's continuing predation, which fuels her promiscuity. Her voice reaches to an anguished pitch when her brother's tumor returns; she feels guilt at having left him to cope with her mother's religious mania. Some readers may be turned off at this point, depressed by the deathbed vigil or the narrator's inevitable breakdown, but those who persevere will have read an unforgettable novel. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.