We Pretty Pieces of Flesh

Starred review from January 15, 2025
The complicated relationship among three Doncaster lasses. Written in savory Yorkshire dialect (perfectly comprehensible to non-locals after a page or two), Brown's first novel follows the trio from age 11 in 1998, when they bond on the first day of "big school," through a fraught reunion in 2017, when a long-kept secret finally comes out. We begin with Rachael's first-person recollections of a wild night out in their teens that sketches the social and emotional currents informing their interactions. Rach's two-parent family sits at the top of the British working class, and as the girls start big school has just moved to a better neighborhood. Kel and Shaz have the "same single mums they called 'mam, ' same state-sponsored quid-a-day [lunch] money, same missing dads." In Rach's view, Shaz is the tough girl who knows more and dares more, though Rach also thinks she lies about some of her escapades and isn't afraid to say so, while Kel anxiously tries to keep the peace. When the novel switches to Shaz's point of view, a second-person narration that reflects her alienated psychological state, we see that to her Rach is the solid, self-assured one clearly headed for better things. That's why Shaz can't reveal a shameful episode involving the boy Rach is dating, "cuz it's whorish behaviour, innit." In their world, girls are supposed to be sexually free but not "slags," and signals are equally mixed about rising out of the working class. Is going to "uni" and getting a decent job making something of yourself, or getting above yourself? There aren't any definite answers as Brown perceptively chronicles the shifting power dynamics of the girls' teenage years and then their separate odysseys as Rachael becomes a teacher, Kel moves to America, and Shaz sinks lower and lower with drugs, drink, and lousy jobs. A moving conclusion opens old wounds but suggests healing is possible for women who have meant so much to each other for so long. A brilliant portrait of female friendship, nearly the equal in honesty and subtlety to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels.

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Starred review from March 1, 2025
Brown's debut is a novel in stories concerning three best friends--Shaz, Kel, and Rach--as they come of age in Yorkshire, England, at the dawn of the millennium. Playing with language, dialect, perspective, and time, Brown casts an amorphous, even unwieldy net, and gathers nothing short of lifelike characters experiencing true relationships that are rancorous, hurtful, giddy, and transcendent. Primary among the things that shape the girls is their home town, Doncaster, or ""Donny,"" a stop on the way to London for everyone else. ""Any commuter foolish enough to breech station's threshold would backstep sharpish intut concourse's promise of elsewhere and thank fuck they dint get themsens stuck here."" As the girls grow together and apart, move away and marry, experience sexual assault and other traumas, we learn as much about each one through her friends' eyes as in her own words. ""Int years to come, Shaz would be grateful for Kel's form of love--and miss it, and understand its value only when it wa gone--but it wa so different to Rach's, which wa hot and intense and hard to win."" Like the most beguiling fiction about friendship and girlhood, Brown's heartful, humane debut will pull readers in and make them wonder how anyone survives either.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.