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Summary and Reviews of But the Girl by Jessica Yu

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

But the Girl

by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
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  • Mar 2024, 270 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

"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?

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Reviews

Media Reviews

The Guardian
Impressive... Yu remakes the art of writing itself.

Australian Book Review
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.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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.

Author Blurb Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
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.

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