As we finish up the end of Girl, Woman, Other I can’t help but thinking about my overall reactions to the book as a whole. Partially because most of the characters from the earlier parts of the book appear, but the overall thoughts I have had about the book and how they are exaggerated here in this final part. At its core, the book is great. The substance is there. My problem comes with how the information and the plot was presented. I am not the biggest fan of that. I felt this even more so with the final chapter specifically because of how much bouncing around from character to character is done. I spent a lot of the ending trying to play catch up while I tried to remember who all of these people are and what they did in their chapters. The one part that resonated more than the rest was the moment between Amma and Dominique where they are doing lines in the bathroom. The line specifically was, “no matter how long since they’ve last seen each other, the distance of three thousand miles across America, plus another four thousand across an ocean, dissolves as if it was never a barrier in the first place” (p 428). Something about that line hit me hard, and I thought about my relationships that have grown apart due to distance. I hope when I meet up with these people again we have the same thing happen to us.
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