Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2024
270 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Paperback Original.
Publication Information
"Having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me…"
Girl was born on the very day her parents and grandmother immigrated from Malaysia to Australia. The story goes that her mother held on tight to her pelvic muscles in an effort to gift her the privilege of an Australian passport. But it's hard to be the embodiment of all your family's hopes and dreams, especially in a country that's hostile to your very existence.
When Girl receives a scholarship to travel to the UK, she is finally free for the first time. In London and then Scotland she is meant to be working on a PhD on Sylvia Plath and writing a postcolonial novel. But Girl can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of the people who raised her. How can she reconcile their expectations with her reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a "postcolonial novel"? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity, but learning to understand the people who made you who you are?
"Zhan's bildungsroman brims with striking insights and fully realized characters, exploring with nuance and self-deprecating humor the fraught reality of navigating academic and artistic spaces as a woman of color. This signals the arrival of a bold new voice." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Impressive... Yu remakes the art of writing itself." —Guardian
"Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's début novel, But the Girl...offers something more compelling than navel-gazing: a critique of classical literature, specifically the work of Sylvia Plath, through personal and academic lenses." —Australian Book Review
"But the Girl is a vivid novel of consciousness with a delightful sense of play. Jessica Zhan Mei Yu writes with striking originality that combines the irreverent and the philosophical about the ambiguities and ambivalences of contemporary life. A wonderful new novel for a metamodern world." —Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
This information about But the Girl was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. Her writing has been published in Best Australian Poems, Overland, Yen, The Sydney Morning Herald, The White Review and more. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Prize for Literature Award in the Unpublished Manuscript category. But the Girl is her first novel and her first essay collection, All the Stain is Tender, is set to follow.
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