How long does it take to read A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing?
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride takes about 4 hours 11 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 11 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2013. 228 pages, about 62,700 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 58 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 11 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 37 minutes |
The page count is the median across 12 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Eimear McBride's novel tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother who is living with the after effects of a brain tunour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and sensual urges of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist, to read A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world first-hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation. Eimear McBride's debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist, to read A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world first-hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation. Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity and mordant wit. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny - and alarming. It is a book you will never forget. The story is about a young woman's relationship with her older brother, who suffers a brain tumour in childhood that later returns when he is a young man. It spans roughly 20 years and is set largely in an isolated farming community in the west of Ireland at a time when the Catholic Church dominated every facet of a person's life. The first thing that strikes you about the novel is the prose style, which ignores all the usual conventions about use of the English language and quite brilliantly furrows its own unique groove. While it…
Subjects: Fiction, psychological, Fiction, coming of age, Brothers and sisters, fiction, Fiction, family life, Brothers and sisters, Fiction
