Girl Reading

by Katie Ward

Book by Ward, Katie

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Books About Books, Art, Book Club, Historical

340 pages, Paperback

Published January 5, 2012

About the author

Katie Ward is an award-winning author from Suffolk UK. Her new novel, Pathways, is published by Fleet (Little, Brown UK 2024). Pathways is contemporary fiction: about Cara, a neuroscientist trying to make a contribution to the field; and Heather, her almost-stepdaughter, trying to find ways to express herself. Set partly in the research labs of Cambridge – and partly on the luminous streets of Las Vegas – these two different worldviews seem irreconcilable. Fascinating, perceptive and intimate, Pathways is a novel of both the heart and the head.

Katie’s debut novel, Girl Reading, was published in the UK (Virago 2011), US (Scribner 2012) and South Korea (박하 Bakha 2014). It was a Cactus TV Book Club selection and a book of the week on the Oprah Blog. In 2013 Katie received the Clarissa Luard Award from Hilary Mantel.

Katie says this: ‘Novels are intimate. They are an opportunity to share a point of view, to show and feel what cannot easily be explained. Some ideas are too intriguing and multifaceted to ignore: you stick with them because there is more you need to know. You’re trying to get as close as possible to your characters and story, until they are revealed. You can struggle with a manuscript for years, and eventually it’s finished because you’ve found the answers you were looking for. Then your novel goes out into the world and it becomes a mystery again.’

Reviews

[Kinga · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent book and you might wonder why I haven't given it five stars. Many people have given it five stars and they are right. I, however, am mean and stingy with my stars. Girl Reading is Katie Ward's first book, and I am quite certain that she will give me some five star material soon. She is probably writing something five-staresque as we speak.

Girl Reading is really a collection of short stories posing as a novel. I think I can see a trend there - does it mean that publishers are finally starting to embrace short stories, the eternal bastard child of the publishing world?

I hope so.

Katie Ward based her stories around different work of arts depicting women reading. And we're talking a journey from 14th century to the year 2060. It is often a problem with short story anthologies that while reading you are abruptly taken out of one story and thrown into another one. Surprisingly, the transition in 'Girl Reading' is astonishingly seamless, and that despite different characters, times and locations. This was what I found most impressive about the book.

The stories are simply beautiful. Katie Ward can knock out most other debut writers out there in the first round and her imagination is vivid enough for her to take on David Mitchell. She writes about paintings which show women reading or writing and it gets very clever and metaphysical.

In the last story all the stories come together and make sense (or don't at all, depending on how smart you are).

My only tiny complaint (you know I had to) is that the book doesn't use inverted commas for dialogues. I honestly and truly do not understand this new fashion. It seems to me as if they are trying to make the book more impenetrable and confusing to create the impression it is more 'literary'. Really unnecessary, this book is probably too clever for its own good as it is.

Anyway, note her name down, Katie Ward is my new darling.

[Lottie · Rating 2 out of 5]

The old saying goes ‘you don’t miss something until it is gone’. In this book I really missed speech-marks. Call me lazy but I quite like to be able to identify who is talking by a slight flick of ink on a page. Speech-marks are important and whether you are trying to be literary or challenge your readers you should understand that readers have grown up with speech-marks and are not about to have them whisked away like some forlorn apostrophe I could mention.

I did struggle with Girl Reading and I think this may be why I have been reluctant to review it. The book is split into seven narratives, each focussing on a girl reading between the medieval times through to the techno-enhanced future. I think what I found hard about this book is that I found each narrative disjointed. Yes, there is a theme of girls reading in various situations and there is an essence of artwork that flows through the chapters, but they are all so completely different that they can be read as individual short stories. The concluding chapter, based in the future tries desperately to link all these girls together, but I just found the link too weak and tedious. I would have been more comfortable with it if it was left as seven individual portraits, snapshots of time that don’t have to be connected but can just exist in their own bubbles. It would have been easier to accept a book without speech-marks if the characters had been consistent, but as they are ever changing through the times it is hard to recognise voices and traits.

Perhaps it is just me, and you will pick up Girl Reading and adore it and rave about it to your friends. I for one won’t be raving about it, but I won’t be forgetting it either. I think this novel desires an acquired taste, and I just don’t think I’m there yet.

[MaryannC Victorian Dreamer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice little gem of a book. I am not usually one for stories because I feel like I'm let down when the story ends quickly and I want more, but I didnt want to miss out on all good things I heard about this book and I was glad I gave it a try.

[The Bookish Wombat · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’ve been putting off writing about my views of this book as I really didn’t enjoy it and only finished it because I was sent it to review. When I looked online after reading it I found that I’m definitely in a minority as lots of readers, both famous and anonymous, are hailing it as the best thing since the literary equivalent of sliced bread.

I really can’t agree, as the emotion I felt most often while reading it was irritation. For a start it’s described as a novel, but it really isn’t one. It’s a collection of short stories linked by common themes and in a way that only becomes fully apparent in the final section. The structure of the book means that only a snapshot of each character’s story is presented in their chapter and (presumably) that the reader isn’t meant to understand everything or be bothered that she doesn’t find out what happens to the characters in a wider sense. As the reason for these snapshots doesn’t become fully apparent until the end of the book, while reading the earlier chapters I had the sense of an author who was deliberately being high-handed and who didn’t care whether I understood what was going or not.

Giving the reader these portraits of what was happening during a particular short time frame means that we observe each section much more coolly than we would in a “proper” novel. There’s no point in liking anyone or wanting to know more about the background or the society portrayed as there just isn’t any more. This means that the narrative tension that normally pulls me through a book is gone – there’s no point in wanting to know what happens next as the author isn’t going to tell me.

Petty it may be, but a major source of irritation was the lack of inverted commas which made it much harder to follow who was talking at any particular point in the dialogue. Surely the current grammatical convention has served novelists well for hundreds of years? Whatever the author’s reason for not going down this route, it comes across to me as a type of arrogance and contempt for her readers. The same is true of the lack of explanation of some references within the book to particular terms used during the era in which the particular sections were set. To me, this seems to be the author saying “If you’re too ignorant to know what these mean then you’re too stupid to bother with and I don’t care about you”.

Particular sections of Girl Reading reminded me of Tracey Chevalier, Sarah Waters (2 chapters) and Margaret Atwood. The Bloomsbury Set types in the chapter set in 1916 were also so familiar that I was sure I’d read about them before. All this meant that I didn’t feel I was reading something original and made many of the sections feel like pastiches of other authors rather than original work.

I’m also not entirely sure what the “novel” was trying to say, as to me it appears to demonstrate that, despite hundreds of years of history and increasing female empowerment, the author feels that women’s lives come down to little more than the relationships they have (in the main) with men, how attractive we are as women, and having babies.

Girl Reading feels more like a literary exercise than a living breathing novel, so I couldn’t feel any attachment to it. When I read a novel I need to be engaged and taken out of my own life into someone else’s, whether I like the characters or hate them. I don’t read in order to admire the cleverness of the author who appears to be writing for herself and forgetting that she has an audience.

[Georgiana Derwent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it really difficult to decide on the appropriate rating for this book, swerving anywhere between three and five stars. When I first heard about it - seven linked stories on the subject of pieces of art showing a girl reading - I was torn between two conflicting thoughts: "wow, sounds like a great and unusual concept," and "sounds a bit overly pretentious, the author must be going all out to get her Booker Prize nomination." Having read it, I think that both of these thoughts are true to some degree. It is a good concept, and when it works well, it works really well. On the other hand, at times it felt as though the author was trying a little hard and not quite hitting the target. I read some reviews beforehand and found it a bit silly the way so many people were going on about lack of speech marks, but I think that actually sums up the author's attempts to do everything a bit differently, with hit and miss results. It took me quite a while to get through the book and whilst I generally enjoyed it whilst I was making the effort to read it, I felt no compulsion to pick it up again once I'd put it down - I really had to force myself.

Part of the problem is that the quality of the sections varied quite a bit. Two - one about Victorian psychics, one about a woman working for an MP in the modern day - were genuinely some of the best things I've read in ages, and make me feel really harsh about only giving three stars. But most of the other segments, whilst certainly not awful, just didn't grip me. If this were meant to be a book of short stories, the variation in quality wouldn't matter so much - readers could just dip in and out. But the author has stated that this is meant to be read as a coherent novel and therefore it's more of a problem.

I'm certainly open to treating books with only loosely connected stories as complete novels - Cloud Atlas does a similar thing and is one of my top five favourite ever reads; The Rain Before it Falls has each chapter be about a one picture and I really enjoyed that too. But both those books somehow felt more complete and connected. For most of the book, the only thing holding it together is the rather arbitrary connection of "portraits of women reading," which simultaneously make each story not have enough to do with the next to create a clear message or an overarching plot; and a little too similar in both theme and style to keep readers interested. (There's little of Cloud Atlas's brilliant playing around with different genres or writing formats). At the end there's a sort of twist that provides one explanation for how the stories link together but I found it utterly forced and unconvincing.

In conclusion, this is certainly not a terrible book - it's a good idea that is reasonably well executed and it's well written. But at the same time, because of how it drags and how "try-hard" it is in parts I can't quite recommend it as a whole. If you can borrow the book, I would however recommend you read the two stories I mention above. I also fully intend to read the author's next book, in the hope that by then her obvious writing talent will have come to more consistent fruition. If she could write a whole novel as good as the two great sections of this book I think it would be a real classic, but this simply isn't.

[Susan Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Girl Reading, a debut novel, Katie Ward paints seven portraits of girls reading—their lives, their conflicts, their passions, their griefs. The author’s prose is rich, her syntax spare, exact, sometimes provocative, often surprising, usually delightful.

From the start we are caught up in the characters, the stories of young women who read. We watch with them. We weep with them. We wonder, what comes next. In short, most of the time we can’t turn the page fast enough, except for those passages we need to ponder.

On its skeletal level, the work yolks together two disciplines—painting and writing. As the painter uses tempera, oil, camera, or video to paint a picture that tells a story, so Ms. Ward uses words to effect the same. Seven stories—each one evocative of a unique age and its overriding dilemma; and the characters, reflective of their time, are so full of flesh and blood that you expect to see them emerging from the spine. Seven stories of the human race flow from and ping back to seven images. In the end, a synchronicity: the last section, which I had to read a couple of times before I understood, knitting together all parts into a whole, and, with a start, we discover the story at its heart, the unity of the work.

The reader draws to a deeper understanding of the early and late Renaissance, the Victorian era, the twentieth century, the present, and beyond. The world is seen from characters on the fringe, either because of their class or beliefs. Themes include humanity’s inability to see, to know the truth, given the social constructs and limitations which inhibit understanding. And the core image of a girl reading in this context is ironic.

The book is a must for all serious readers interested in history and in the current direction of literary fiction.

One comment: the cover says the book is available as an e-book. But, alas, I found out, not for us North American customers, at least not when I ordered the paperback from Amazon a few weeks ago (Virago Press, 2011). But no matter. When I read an e-book I like, I buy the real thing, and now I have it. Physically, the book is a joy, not too heavy to hold. It’s typeset in Horley, a pleasing font set in a very readable size—so crisp compared to e-ink, which has, let’s face it, a long way to go before it approaches the genuine article.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, I was completely immersed and when I had finished the seventh section I went back to check out the links and connections I thought I could see. I haven't read a book that has engaged me this much for ages.

I see from earlier reviews that others have struggled with the lack of punctuation and have found the jump from one story to another rather disruptive. I didn't have either of those problems, I think I have developed a style of reading for books like this (based on reading Cloud Atlas perhaps and The Time Traveler's Wife) where you just have to absorb it, not get too bogged down in the detail and let yourself get the atmosphere and the impression. And there is loads of atmosphere in this book.

I don't agree with those who feel it is disjointed, I think it is building up to an ending and the ending doesn't disappoint. To stick with Katie's kind of analogy, each story is another aspect of the painting being sketched out and filled in by the artist.

For me the payoff came quite clearly in the final story, with a slow realisation that we are being warned that much as we love to review books on the Goodreads site and to look up the fine art images on Google, we need to think hard about what we really value and how what we need to do to preserve it.

I love my Kindle, but I love to flick the corners of the pages of a book as I read and to write with pen on paper to make a note of what I think.

I am not sure if I will make it to 2060 to see how much Sibil was a prediction rather than a fiction. Not too much I hope.

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is really a series of short stories disguised as a novel. The theme of art featuring women reading is repeated in each of the seven stories and more clearly defined in the final story; however, it is not prominent enough in some of the chapters to really warrant packaging this as a novel rather than short stories.

I think it is a cynical attempt to sell more copies of this book by pretending that it is a novel not a short story collection.

The writing is flawed in other ways - there are no punctuation marks for speech which means that the writing doesn't flow and you are jarred out of the story. The first story is almost impenetrable because of this style. However, the writing style does become easier as you read further into the stories.

A couple of the stories are genuinely interesting with compelling characters and I couldn't help wishing that Ward has just written a whole novel based on ones of the stories rather than introducing a new independent story every 50 pages.

The cover, however, is beautiful and probably the best thing about this book.

[Mark Patton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katie Ward's debut novel is a book of extraordinary scope and vision. Like Cloud Atlasor If on a winter's night a traveler, it consists of a number of stories, seemingly separate, but in fact intricately related, and in such a way that the book as a whole is very much greater than the sum of its parts. In this case the theme which links them is of an image of a girl or woman reading a text. There are seven chapters, eached based around the production of an image by an artist (Simone Martini Annunciation 1333; Pieter Janssens Elinga Woman Reading, 1668; Angelica Kauffman Portrait of a Lady 1775; Featherstone of Piccadily Carte de Visite 1864; Unknown For Pleasure 1916; Immaterialism Reader in a Shoreditch Bar 2008; Sincerity Yabuki Sibil 2060). Some of these images are real ones that can be seen in galleries (listed at the back), others are fictional, but in each case the story explores the circumstances of production of the image, and the relationship between the artist and the sitter. This description, however, does not do justice to the exhilleration that one gets from reading the book itself. It is like a fast moving dance through nine centuries of European history, culminating in a breathtaking tour de force located in a future that is, in cultural terms, as far removed from us as Angelica Kauffman's 18th Century world. Stepping back from the dance at the end of the book, one returns to the simple idea of the image of a girl or woman reading, the sort of image that we see time and again in galleries, to reflect on what is similar and what is different in these different vignettes: what is truly part of the condition of being human and what is contingent to the time and place in which we happen to live. I enjoyed Cloud Atlasbut this book excited me more. It is also, at the end, a far more optimistic book.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some books are quiet books. Gilead comes to mind. As does Jim the Boy. These books don't bowl you over or yank you into the storyline. Instead they slowly, quietly and persistently invite you into their world. Girl Reading is a quiet book. In it, Katie Ward takes you into the world behind seven works of art. Each world is fully fleshed out. Each character different from the last, yet engaging. Each time I left one world and moved on to the next, I wanted more. I like a book that leaves me wanting more.

My only question while reading this book was why it was a novel and not a collection of short stories. Each narrative was independent of the previous and could stand alone. Yet my question was answered nicely by the final chapter and left me pleased I'd spent the time living in the worlds Ward created.

If you have an art history background, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Whether it's the glimpse of pre-Renaissance Italian commissions, Victorian photography or Dutch genre paintings, you may find yourself googling the image mentioned to see it for yourself. (I did - nearly every time.)

If you're a lover of historical fiction and a fan of deeply textured worlds populated by realistic characters, Girl Reading will be just your type of book.

If you're a lover of books that are written in a way that honors the words that go into them, Girl Reading is for you. Katie Ward clearly chooses her words carefully and her nuanced treatment of multiple time periods was amazing to witness.

Read this for a book club. Read it instead of a museum visit. Read it to provide a sense of calm in your otherwise busy spring. Wait for the right time - the time when you can settle in with this book and not rush it. But put it on your to-read list and read it when the time is right. You won't regret it.

[Deborah Pickstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

This book contains two things I really don't like and would normally put a book down over: it is written in present tense (third person which is marginally less bad than first person present) and it is written as a series of barely linked short stories, which I rarely read because they are......short. I was further put off by the cover having a promo quote from Hilary Mantel assuring me it is a great novel - I can't abide Hilary Mantel's writing. However, the subject matter looked sufficiently interesting that I decided to persevere for a bit when I found the rhythm of writing peculiar at the beginning (and it is odd) - it is about pictures of girls reading in different times - 7 different eras are entered. Some are specific extant paintings - the earlier ones and each story tells how one came to be painted. By the end of the first story I was hooked but thought I'd find it a problem moving to the next scenario - but it was not so!

As a debut novel Katie Ward shows astonishing confidence in her writing, breaking many basic conventions about how words are laid out which gives a bit of work to the reader as I attempted to negotiate conversations; it was not always clear who was speaking. It was clearly deliberately done as she stuck rigidly to her own method of delivery. I can appreciate a rule breaker :)

The final story moves into the future and seems more concerned with how we perceive what we are looking at. There are some interesting threads in this one including the perceptual interpreter being called the acronym Sibil. Futurist writing is another thing I generally avoid and I do think this last 'chapter' was the weakest part of the book but I suspect that is my biases poking through?

All in all, this debut from Katie Ward is surprising and interesting, contains originality, vision and perception. I would certainly read more from her and have created a new shelf named 'exceptions to my reading rules' for those few books that win me over despite my stubborn clinging to reading ruts I like to hide in!

[Louise]

I'm sure many people will love this book, but I had to give up on it as it contained no speech marks, and that really annoys me! The dialogue and description just merge together, making it a confusing read.

[Misbah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actual 2.5

This was a brilliant idea and I loved the general premise but I couldn't get on board with the writing style and feel it failed to execute its mission.

My favourite-and-very-specific genre of books are those about painters and paintings (if we want to get more specific Dutch paintings of the golden age) so this should have been perfect for me. Each chapter moves to a new story based on a real painting of a woman shown reading, there is so much to explore here; the relationship between women and reading, women and education and art etc. instead the book felt more melodramatic or rambling with no destination.

I found that the characters felt very flat, which is a shame because this was an opportunity to give the women in the painting a voice and story beyond the brush strokes (albeit a fictional one). The writing style was a real challenge which I usually like, but in this instance it got in the way of the plot and any enjoyment one might have reading this.

I do however really commend the author for her originality and the choice of paintings, these weren't obvious choices but made me seek out and learn which is always a good thing.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Think I spoilt this book for myself as it just took me so long to read with so many breaks.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

While flicking through the opening pages of this in my local library I was surprised to note that the first chapter was sat in the city of Sienna, during the early Renaissance, with a particular focus on the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala. One of the oldest examples of a purpose-built hospital in the world, I visited this exact place on holiday just under a year ago. Not only that but there was a mention of the hospital oratory on the lower floors, the experience of which I wrote about last April. So of course I had to borrow this book.

It is historical fiction, but not as one might expect. The novel is split into seven chapters, each of which is set in a different period of time between 1333 and 2060. Each chapter is essentially a self-contained story, and each revolves around the image of a woman reading. This image takes the form of a painting or a photograph; some of these are works of art which really exist, while others are imaginary; some are valued treasures, others are fleeting examples of their type. In every case the actual fixing of the image only takes up a small part of the life of the subject. For the most part this device becomes a convenient device to place the reader within a fast-flowing story at a pivotal point in each character’s life.

It’s perhaps inevitable in a book like this that I’ll favour some of the stories over others. And that was the case here, to an extent: I liked the first story in Sienna; I liked the character of Esther, a deaf maid in the Amsterdam of 1668; and I was charmed by the story of Gwen and Cynthia, a late teenager and an older scholar respectively, and the love triangle formed in rural England near the end of WWI. But there’s much else here which is forgettable. It isn’t that the writing is bad, but there seems to be so much of it. The dialogue is often interminable. And it’s hard for a novel structured in this way to seem consequential when you know that each story has no bearing on the next. There are no great surprises here, which is perhaps the point — we join and leave in character in media res — but part of me wanted more formalism, more structure in the way the themes run through the book.

The final chapter does introduce a twist which attempts to reflect and link together what has come before. I won’t say more about it because I did quite enjoy the conceit, but I was disappointed to see that ultimately not much was done with it. I never felt, for example, that there’d be any benefit in rereading what I’d finished with my new knowledge in order to tease out further implications in the text — there just isn’t that much here to support that kind of reading. There’s no revelation, no urge to reconsider. There's no mystery here, and by shedding the suggestion of further ambiguities to come, the final chapter ends up reducing the experience. And so the book’s final conceit becomes a bit like one of those endings to a TV show where the audience discovers that the whole thing was entirely a dream inside the head of a dying man. Rather neat, you think; but why should it matter?

[BookAmbler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have met the author through BookCrossing so I was a little nervous about reading this book on account of Katie and I once disagreed completely on The Accidental by Ali Smith. I was concerned that Girl Reading was going to be a book I hated! Also, although it is hailed as 'seven portraits', to me it's seven short stories; I must be a lazy reader because I find short stories too much like hard work and rarely read them. I was finding the 'girl reading' theme very tenuous until the final story which then makes more sense of the link.

Anyhoo, the great news is that I loved the book :) In a nutshell I was amazed by the imagination, impressed by the knowledge on such a wide range of subjects, awed by how the words flowed and the pages turned, confounded by what the author wasn't telling me. Not a book for someone who likes neat and tidy endings!

BookCrossers can enjoy the reference to BookCrossing on page 250. (Why was I surprised to find it there?!) There was another (personal) surprise for me right at the end, when Phoebe was introduced, but I can't say why without giving a spoiler.

On a grammatical aside... no speech marks, errrm, no kidding, not one quotation mark thoughout the whole book??! And quite a few dropped commas. Eh?!!! OK, so I'm guessing this is some kind of experiment with redundancy in the English language. Well, I'm far too proper for that kind of new fangled nonsense - but if you're looking for feedback - it caught me out about 1% of the time such that I had to re-read the paragraph.

Simone Martini, Annunciation, 1333.
Orphan is chosen to sit with a (struggling) artist – not sit for initially – but then they confide in each other and become friends, albeit briefly.

Pieter Janssens Elinga, Woman Reading, 1668.
A hard working housemaid comes across some books (graphic novels?) of her mistress’s and snatches a moment to read them. The artist spots her and uses her as an unknowing subject. Interesting subplot(s) about communication and being different.

Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of a Lady, 1775.
Maria and Frances… we never find out what happened to Frances. And Coward the dog.

Featherstone of Piccadilly, Carte de Visite, 1864.
My favourite… about Rosie and Flossie, mediums and photographers. What was on the carte de visite? Our Secret.

Unknown, For Pleasure, 1916.
Gwen – who must be about 15 – falls in love with an older man. She is the artist.

Immaterialism, Reader in a Shoreditch Bar, 2008.
Skating memories. Black woman working in London gets the ache with her boyfriend. Two endings, but one isn’t at the end!

Sincerity Yabuki, Sibil, 2060.
The Mesh, Cloud, i-ris, Phoebe.

[Kristin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, I really liked the concept. The writing was quite good. I liked how the stories weren't really connected, yet every now and then a painting from one story was mentioned in another story (and they're all mentioned in the last story, which takes place in the future). I liked that there were some real paintings, then some fictional photographs, which were based on real carte de vistes and Flikr photos. And I liked how there was a futuristic story to tie things together. But in the end, I just thought the book was okay. Part of that, I must admit, is because the author doesn't use quotation marks at all, and there is A LOT of dialogue. It is absolutely maddening. I did get more used to it as I read, but it made the book more challenging to read. Since the subject is clearly supposed to be thought-provoking/-inspiring, that one small detail really threw me out of the world of the book and kept me from pondering as I felt I ought to be. And on top of that, I just didn't feel much connection to, or sympathy with, the characters. Of all the stories, I think I most enjoyed Pieter Janssens Elinga, Woman Reading, 1668. And the reason I liked that one was because the main character a young deaf servant in the household of the painter, was the most sympathetic of all the characters. I also liked the young girl in Unknown, For Pleasure, 1916, who reminded me a bit of Briony in Atonement with her restlessness, desire for something to happen, and confusion about love. Otherwise, I was disappointed with my reaction to this book. It had so much promise, but just didn't quite get there.

[Girl with her Head in a Book · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Katie Ward's first novel and I was still thinking about it three days after I had finished it, so I think it's fair to say that she's done a decent job. Strictly speaking, it doesn't seem to be a novel. There are seven disconnected stories, but they are linked together in the final chapter which is set in the future ... still I have a wee suspicion that somebody's publisher very much wanted to push it as a novel rather than a collection of short stories which is after all the Cinderella of the publishing world. All of the stories concern pictures of women reading or the 'literate female' as they are described in the final chapter.

In many ways, this felt like more of a piece of art than a novel - and I don't have a particularly good track record for understanding art - I'm a word girl. This is not to say that I don't enjoy looking, the Louvre is one of my favourite places in the world and I collect postcards because I like the pictures but I'm not so good at the deciphering What It All Means. You can see that Ward is trying to be clever in this novel, she doesn't use any speech marks which is often confusing although I got over it very quickly. It's like she's trying to be minimalistic - sparing with the details of her characters, sparing with her punctuation. It's literary modern art.

For my full review:
http://girlwithherheadinabook.blogspo...

[Karen Mace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a little more miss than hit for me but that isn't to say I didn't enjoy reading it! Loved the fact that it was short stories set over different time periods in history and featuring a common thread, but for me some of these stories were more captivating than others and at times I lost my love for the stories and my mind kept wandering!

It was beautifully written, and some of the characters and settings featured were extremely interesting and fascinating but overall I just didn't get the love I was hoping to find - the cover is extremely beautiful though!

[EditorialEyes · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5. This and other reviews at EditorialEyes Book Blog
~*~
Seven women in seven different eras contemplate reading and art in Katie Ward’s ambitious debut novel Girl Reading. Each section introduces a new story, a new set of characters and circumstances, and a new work of art that was inspired by and includes the likeness of a girl or woman reading. In doing so, Ward gets to create rich stories in different time periods while discussing the nature of art and the role of reading in women’s lives.

While called a novel, this is, in fact, much closer to a set of seven themed short stories or very short novellas. They range in place, time, and context, while maintaining a similarity of tone throughout. First is Italian master Simone Maritni using an orphaned girl as his model of Mary in his Annunciation in 1333; next a deaf woman named Esther works as a maid in the household of Dutch artist Pieter Janssens Elinga in 1668; third, a celebrated female portraitist paints a likeness of a dead poetess for her grieving lover, a Lady in British society who has fallen into despair in 1775. Next, we come to a set of twins who have chosen very different lives, one as a famous spiritual medium and one as the wife of a photographer in London in 1864; then, a girl in 1916 on the cusp of womanhood falls in love with an older artist, and finds herself embroiled in all of the adult issues and entanglements around her; and sixth is a determined young woman, who works for a British MP, has high career aspirations and a terrible boyfriend. Her picture is taken and posted on Flickr in 2008.

Each of these stories stands pretty well alone, and could be read as a short story and a meditation on art or gender roles or history. They touch upon similar themes, in particular the difficult roles women have had to play, the way they have so often been preyed upon throughout history, and the reserves of inner strength individual women can and must tap into. Most of the main characters find themselves in untenable situations that they simply must deal with and live through, from being an orphan at the whim of powerful men in Renaissance Italy to a grieving noblewoman shunned by society for being gay, to an empowered present-day woman still at the mercy of her boss and her loutish boyfriend.

The stories are ever so slightly unified by the seventh story. Set in 2060, people spend most of their times in an augmented reality called “mesh” and are no longer able to access real, physical art. An engineer named Sincerity Yabuki is showing off her invention, Sibil, a mesh simulation that shows users the stories behind works of art—in particular, six works of art that each feature a female reading. But Sincerity has a secret when it comes to Sibil, and her story calls up questions about the nature of art, of reality, and of living in an increasingly cyber-connected world.

Ward does a number of things well. Her writing style is confident and nuanced, and it’s hard to believe this project is her first book. She easily brings us to the end of one story, erases the etch-a-sketch, and deftly delivers us into a whole new world of characters and contexts. The settings are meticulously researched and constructed. Her worlds quickly engross you. Her leading ladies are accessible and sympathetic, and are never clichéd. Several stories in particular stood out for me: I was brokenhearted for Esther in “Pieter Janssens Elinga” and for Lady Maria in “Angelica Kaufmann.” The unfairness of their situations and the total lack of control they have to do anything but put one foot in front of the other—Esther far better than Maria—are beautifully written. Likewise, I was entranced by the twin sisters of “Featherstone Of Picadilly,” of their arguments about what makes a fulfilling life for a woman, and for the ultimate dilemma the two share.

I found my interest waning in the more contemporary tales, in particular Gwen’s story in “Unknown” and Jeannine’s story in “Immaterialism.” Jeannine was terribly frustrating: while I didn’t want to read about a super woman, necessarily, the story’s focus on clothing, boys, bars, babies, and working at the beck and call of powerful men in order to further her own career felt disappointing. Surely there is more to say about the modern female experience than these things? Surely we’ve come further than poor Laura Agnelli in 1333, all but given to Martini by the priest and with no say in the matter?

I was also disappointed by the heavily eurocentric bias of the overall book. With the opportunity to look at women’s roles, the nature of art, and the importance of stories and literacy, setting the first six stories in Europe, and mostly, in fact, in England, seems like such a waste to me, and feeds into the usual Western ideas of “great art” and “master artists” being only from Europe. Sure, Serenity Yabuki is of some sort of Asian background, but the world depicted in 2060 has become globalized and the focus isn’t about a particular history but about gathering together the other six stories. I would have loved to see stories from Japan or China or India, from the Tuareg or the Assinboine or the Aztec. Art doesn’t just happen in Europe.

And perhaps this is a small pet peeve, but throughout there are no quotation marks. None. I absolutely despise this convention if it occurs for no good reason. Lack of quotation marks if the entire narrative is being told campfire- or confessional-style by a character is fine. (Junot Diaz is a good example of someone who uses lack-of-quotation-marks well.) Here, there doesn’t seem to be any reason whatsoever for it, and they’re sorely missed. Dialogue is often confusing because it’s impossible to tell who is speaking, or when speech stops and narrative picks back up again. This was a really poor style choice, and unfortunately smacks of pretension.

This is a funny book for me to have read this month. I picked it up quite by accident, having stumbled across the title and immediately falling in love with the premise. I’m currently eyeball-deep in an in-depth readalong of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a series of six deeply disparate and yet subtly, intricately interwoven stories. Ward’s writing seems influenced by Mitchell’s style (he does similar things in his also brilliant Ghostwritten), but the lack of connection beyond a sort of overall theme of “reading” and “art” and “women” keeps this book from being truly great. It’s ambitious, but it’s not really a grand, sweeping novel. It’s a set of well-written short stories, not the epic that I imagine it was meant to be.

But give Katie Ward time. In spite of my criticisms, this is an impressive debut novel, with great settings and characters, and big ideas at play. I look forward to reading her second book, whenever that may be.

[Alarie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I almost gave this book a fifth star for complexity and inventiveness. The cover says “novel,” but it reads like a collection of thematically related short stories. The stories are related by being ekphrastic (inspired by art), containing women or girls who read, and by feminism. You needn’t know the art to appreciate the stories. In fact, some chapters/stories seem to be from art only in the sense that the author got some idea from a painting, sometimes several, that she saw, but they aren’t as specifically tied to the art. For example, the first stories have famous artists appear as characters, but that connection loosens as Ward writes on. The stories cover over 700 years, beginning in 1333. The last story is science fiction that ties to the earlier work by considering how we perceive art. All very interesting, but sometimes short stories frustrate me because they can drop off so abruptly, right at the point I’ve started to like the protagonist and want to know more.

Tip: If you’re an art lover like I am, it’s fun to Goggle the artwork that inspired the book. Ward provides a listing under “A Note” at the end of the book. Even more interesting to me was an interview with Katie Ward that comes after the list and book club discussion guide.

[Kali · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of short stories spanning different historical periods, focusing on a girl or woman reading, plus art. This book sounds right up my street, but I wasn't as into it as I hoped. There's some beautiful writing here, and there's real historical immersion; you absolutley get a sense that Ward has done her research. For me the stories themselves fell a bit flat. I struggled to care about most of the characters. And while I don't mind not having speech marks, in this case I wanted them as it often wasn't clear what was dialogue/who was talking etc.

[Bert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Katie Ward uses her same, fresh and lively, style of writing throughout the whole book, and yet each story reads as one written in the peculiar era it's telling about. This is the biggest praise I can give this debut novel. It's more than a journey through history. This book offers also a splendid insight in the developments of novel-writing.

[Lisa Bywell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good concept. Ever so slightly bonkers book. Some of the chapters are far better than others. The author is really testing how clever we are as readers so it would be a good one for a book club to discuss/fight about.

[Sarah M]

Yep that’s a DNF I’m afraid

Really tried to give this a go cus I thought the first story was ok, but I just couldn’t get into it after that

[Nora · Rating 3 out of 5]

bring back punctuation marks! i want to understand what’s going on!
i thought it was very fun to be reading a book called girl reading
i loved the format and premise but the stories didn’t always uphold the cool idea. except the 1775 chapter because i love lesbians and their love was beautiful

[Sally McAlpin]

I really enjoyed this book, the last chapter was the most challenging as it projected forwards, but worth wrestling with.

[Ash · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lovely concept, lovely narratives. I cannot follow the format of the writing so I didn’t bother to finish. A shame.

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been tucked away on a shelf waiting to be read. Each chapter is devoted to a work of art featuring a girl and a book, although I was disappointed that this edition did not include the images themselves. It is not exactly what I imagined it would be, but then, I try to be open to the unexpected. The last chapter, set in the future, wraps up the whole book in a philosophically satisfying manner.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read! Will read this again!