The lesser bohemians

*Starred Review* As in her first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), McBride molds unrestrained language to imaginative effect, using punctuation sparely and styling dialogue and page space unconventionally. It's jarring at first, but perhaps even more jarring when all this is scarcely noticed, and only its imprint absorbed. An Irish girl, just moved to London for theater school in the mid-1990s, meets a charming stranger, also an actor and much older than her. (Neither character is named for well over half the novel.) At a bar, they bond over his copy of Dostoyevsky's The Devils and go back to his place for charming, clumsy sex (her first). She doesn't expect much, until, quickly, things change. Sometimes serendipitously, but more often on purpose, they're together and the sex becomes far from clumsy. Occasionally he's aloof, and she distracts herself with drink, drug, and other men to not think of him, painfully and unsuccessfully. Wonder about his past, much longer than hers, consumes her until all at once he tells her his story, and it's this narrative of unfathomable abuse, addiction, and redemption that nearly becomes another novel inside this one. Divided into the terms of an academic year, this is, above all, a love story: bare, achingly romantic, and crushingly felt.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist

McBride's second novel is more ambitious than her acclaimed debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and it retains the uncompromisingly Joycean brogue and diary-like intimations of adolescence that made that first novel such a success. Set between 1994 and 1995, it follows 18-year-old Eily, a boozy ingénue, as she leaves her native Ireland to attend drama school in London. There, caught in whirl of excess and the shadow of IRA terrorism, she is mostly assigned stereotypically Irish bit parts, but finds herself captivated by a much older actor named Stephen, an ex-junkie estranged from his family and young daughter. Initially meeting without names, they embark on a tempestuous relationship that reveals the worst in both while offering Stephen a chance at redemption and Eily a future. But the real focus is McBride's stream-of-consciousness prose, in which drinking is rendered as "pints turning telescope," "the lightless hall sings sanctuary from the frenzy" of a violent encounter, and a night of youthful debauchery leaves the revelers with "Satan under every skin. Skinful under all our skin." The story (especially when Stephen's backstory hijacks the narrative) isn't full enough to sustain McBride's style, which comes to seem less and less an accurate shorthand for first love. Still, this sophomore effort is striking enough to continue McBride's forging of a daring career. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* As in her first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), McBride molds unrestrained language to imaginative effect, using punctuation sparely and styling dialogue and page space unconventionally. It's jarring at first, but perhaps even more jarring when all this is scarcely noticed, and only its imprint absorbed. An Irish girl, just moved to London for theater school in the mid-1990s, meets a charming stranger, also an actor and much older than her. (Neither character is named for well over half the novel.) At a bar, they bond over his copy of Dostoyevsky's The Devils and go back to his place for charming, clumsy sex (her first). She doesn't expect much, until, quickly, things change. Sometimes serendipitously, but more often on purpose, they're together and the sex becomes far from clumsy. Occasionally he's aloof, and she distracts herself with drink, drug, and other men to not think of him, painfully and unsuccessfully. Wonder about his past, much longer than hers, consumes her until all at once he tells her his story, and it's this narrative of unfathomable abuse, addiction, and redemption that nearly becomes another novel inside this one. Divided into the terms of an academic year, this is, above all, a love story: bare, achingly romantic, and crushingly felt. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

Having won multiple honors (e.g., the Baileys Women's Prize) for her brilliant and coruscating first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, McBride returns with the story of a naïve 18-year-old Irish lass studying acting in mid-1990s London. Naturally, she launches an affair with an established actor 20 years her senior. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

McBride's second novel is more ambitious than her acclaimed debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and it retains the uncompromisingly Joycean brogue and diary-like intimations of adolescence that made that first novel such a success. Set between 1994 and 1995, it follows 18-year-old Eily, a boozy ingénue, as she leaves her native Ireland to attend drama school in London. There, caught in whirl of excess and the shadow of IRA terrorism, she is mostly assigned stereotypically Irish bit parts, but finds herself captivated by a much older actor named Stephen, an ex-junkie estranged from his family and young daughter. Initially meeting without names, they embark on a tempestuous relationship that reveals the worst in both while offering Stephen a chance at redemption and Eily a future. But the real focus is McBride's stream-of-consciousness prose, in which drinking is rendered as "pints turning telescope," "the lightless hall sings sanctuary from the frenzy" of a violent encounter, and a night of youthful debauchery leaves the revelers with "Satan under every skin. Skinful under all our skin." The story (especially when Stephen's backstory hijacks the narrative) isn't full enough to sustain McBride's style, which comes to seem less and less an accurate shorthand for first love. Still, this sophomore effort is striking enough to continue McBride's forging of a daring career. (Sept.)