WE PRETTY PIECES OF FLESH, they left Doncaster only in body

WE PRETTY PIECES OF FLESH
COLWILL BROWN
Henry Holt and Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant and ribald debut novel about three adolescent girls coming of age in a gritty post-industrial town in Yorkshire, England in the ‘90s who are as sweetly vulnerable and funny as they are cunning and tough

“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But it’s also the home of Rach, Kel, and Shaz, bezzies since childhood. From scheming one another’s first kisses, to sneaking vodka (or the occasional Cointreau) into school in water bottles, to accompanying one another to Family Planning for pregnancy tests, the girls come of age together, Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace—the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as the girls grow up and away from each other, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart. Is their shared past enough to keep them close?

Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh spans decades and continents as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, making one overlooked and forgotten place the very center of the world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know how much people dislike, even hate, the word "moist"? That's how I feel about the word "pungent." It's a shuddersome word, one that sounds like someone tone-deaf and with a cold is trying to hum "Born in the USA."

Yet I'm about to use it, approvingly, about the narrative voice in this novel. It's pungent, in its "sharply affecting the mind, curt and expressive" (etymonline.com) sense prevalent by 1850 about writing. When I could grow them I used to eat two or three french breakfast radishes daily because, while I don't like the word, I do like pungent things.

I liked reading this Yorkshire dialect because it got into my mind sharply, evocatively. I enjoy that kind of reading experience. It breaks the sameness, the US-standard English that makes up most reading I do, fiction or non-fiction. It reaches different places in my emotional system by "sounding" different.

You thought about them lasses ont bus, their painted faces and their bad sex facts, trying their hardest to grow intut only version of themsens they thought they wa allowed to be. Feminism had took one look at Donny and thought, Reckon I'll gi this a miss.

It's all there, it's all in that short span, and you know already if this tale is for you. It was for me so I really hope it appeals to some of y'all.

What stories we hear when we're open to listening differently, being there in a different way for what the author wants us to know. This is a braided-stories novel, one that switches tenses and PoVs to make its points and build its world. The three friends start year seven in 1998, well into the awful social Darwinism Yorkshire got chewed up by the bad economics from the successor regimes to that slime Thatcher's hatcheting of the industrial base.

Rach, a uni-directed future teacher, and Kel, the spirited escapee who moves to the US, leave Shaz behind in Donny (-caster, get it?) not entirely on purpose. As mentioned these young women tell us their stories but without reassuring you there's only one voice per narrative...possibly narrator, either, I wasn't all the way sure about that. Shaz is...she's badly damaged, she is stuck, mired in Donny because a horrible, terrible, violent thing happened to her. Moving past it feels impossible, like shifting one of the pyramids at Giza with your mind, alone. It is worse than only the trauma she suffered. It is retraumatizing because of a secret she genuinely can't share with Rach and Kel. It felt brutal to me as I read it...strong stuff indeed...but more than anything else, I was destroyed by her bitter dregs of isolation ever after.

To feel unable to speak, even to the closest friends you'll ever have, is a curse that blights a life. I speak from experience. It's possible for Shaz to speak, to heal (again I know this from experience); but it does not happen in this story.

Meeting these three after Life has happened to them was a poignant way to leave them...the fault lines still there but likewise the gravity binding them to a shared center, as they learn what adulthood has done to each of them. And of course the terrible secret is a rock forming an unclimbable obstacle; only one of them knows why, though all know it's there. I'm deeply impressed by this book and its voices; I can't quite get to a full five star rating because the nature of braided stories means things feel...hashed over, rehashed, at times and that is not a positive.

I really hope y'all who liked Shuggie Bain as much as I did will come south to Yorkshire and meet these three Donny lasses. They're good company, despite imperfections. Which, be honest, you have as much as they or I do.