Hey guys, this is Abi here,
And I honestly can't remember the last time I posted a book review! A Girl in Three Parts earned 5 stars from me on Wednesday, so I figured this was worth going into more detail for, especially as it's new out so you can read it too if you so desire.
Enjoy!
Title: A Girl in Three Parts
Author: Suzanne Daniel
Genre: Middle grade.
Status: Standalone (also debut)
Pages: 310
Blurb: "Allegra Elsom
is caught in the middle.
Some days she's eleven, and others she feels closer
to nineteen. Some days she knows too much, and
others she feels hopelessly naïve. Some days she is
split in three, torn between conflicting loyalties to
her grandmothers, Mathilde and Joy, and her father,
Rick- none of whom can stand to be in a room
together since the decades-old tragedy that hit
their family like a wrecking ball.
Allegra struggles to make peace in her family
and navigate the social gauntlet at school while
asking bigger questions about her place in the
world: What does it mean to be "liberated"? What is
it about "becoming a woman" that earns her a slap
in the face? What does it mean to do the right thing,
when everyone around her defines it differently?
As the feminist movement reshapes her Sydney
suburb, Allegra makes her own path- discovering
firsthand the incredible ways that women can
support each other, and finding strength within
herself to stand up to the people she loves."
How do I start this? Gosh it's been such a long time since I've done this.
A Girl in Three Parts is very much a novel about family. Not a family of mother, father and child as you would think, but Allegra, her two grandmothers, Mathilde and Joy, and her father Rick.
A significant part of why I loved this book so much was to do with the characters, they were so fleshed out, I had no problem distinguishing them from the other grandmother.
Joy is a free-spirited woman, who keeps her tears in bottles, who encourages Allegra to live her "true essence". As strict as Joy is uplifting, Mathilde keeps Allegra on the ball, encouraging her to work her very hardest so she can become a doctor.
Rick, her father, escapes to the waves so he deal with his grief. At the start of the novel he doesn't have much to do with Allegra's upbringing, the love of her both her grandmothers have elbowed him to the outside.
Although these women seem kind of two dimensional at the start, as I progressed further into the book, I grew attached to both of them, as I learned more about them.
As both grandmothers try and mould Allegra into the person they'd both like her to be, (all while Allegra's trying to figure who she is in herself), you're constantly wondering in the back of your head, what happened with Allegra's mother, and why has it created this division between everybody else. I did have a couple of theories about what happened (but all of them proved false, thank goodness.)
As large as the battle raging inside Allegra, another part that I particularly enjoyed was how the Women's Liberation Movement was brought in as a theme for the second half of the book. A Girl in Three Parts is set in the 1970s, and even though it's set after World War II, where the women were keeping the country going when all the men buggered off to fight in the war, some of the characters, (one in particular) were still under the thumb of the men who didn't care one cent of the hard work that went into their work. (If you can't tell I'm angry about this.)
What I liked the most was how this theme was introduced, it didn't feel rushed at all, it didn't feel like I'd blinked and suddenly the book was completely different, it felt like it was relevant and well-written. I very much liked how the existence of the WL movement seemed to affect the characters in the novel, this theme was actually something that made me care for a certain character a whole lot more than I'd previously done.
Another thing I want to mention is how much I enjoyed Allegra's narrative. She was at the point in her life when she's on the brink of finishing primary school and gaining some independence. She's also at the age where she's starting to question who she is as a person, all at the time that her grandmothers and father are trying to influence her constantly and mould her into someone they each want her to be, so that was an interest POV to read from to say the least.
To sum it up, this was one heck of a debut, and I can't wait to see what else Suzanne Daniel has in store. Before I started A Girl in Three Parts, I was hesitant as for whether I was going to gel with the writing, the characters, the story, as we all are when picking up a debut author's work. But I honestly had absolutely nothing to worry about it, because I loved it just as much as I thought I would when I ordered it.
There, I did it.
Okay! That's the end of my review, I'm quite happy with how it turned out, and I'm glad it was about this amazing novel!
I hope you enjoyed it, and let me know what you thought in the comments below!
I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you all at the end of the week with my monthly wrap up!
Byeeeeee!
-Abi
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