‘Remember when we thought Donny wut whole world?‘
I must caveat this review by saying that not only is this book about my hometown (where I still live), I also kinda knew the author a little bit a million years ago. While we were never friends, we briefly moved in the same circles (she drank in the pub I worked in), and always (to my mind), got on fine. While I could claim that I won’t let that colour this review, I am, alas, a human person (allegedly) with human emotions (allegedly) so I can’t promise anything. Let’s dive in…
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh tells the story of three girls from Donny and the considerable ups and downs of their relationship. The book moves liberally between timelines and narrative viewpoints utilising first, second and third person narrative, with the focus switching between the three main characters. It’s a deft storytelling device that ensures that what is essentially a collection of short stories ends up feeling like a cohesive whole with a distinct (if ambiguous) end point. The other most prominent stylistic choice that writer Colwill Brown lands upon here is to write most of the book in a broad Yorkshire dialect in a style similar to Irvine Welsh (more on this later).
I will begin by saying that when We Pretty Pieces… is good, it’s really good. There is plenty of genuinely beautiful writing here. Immersive, poignant, and genuinely affecting at times. The book is steeped in moments of casual and explicit misogyny, plenty of which I recognised from my own Doncaster upbringing, and Brown does a wonderful job of tapping into teenage angst and feelings of uncertainty and how we carry those scars with us deep into adulthood. The three main characters are distinct and fully realised, and the relationship they share feels authentic and lived in.
The issue I have is the relentlessly miserable portrayal of growing up in a working class northern town. The dialect, while an interesting choice, isn’t really accurate to the area, and particularly not to the part of Doncaster the book is set, nor to the era in which it takes place. It sometimes reads more like a parody of Yorkshire dialect that would fit better in something like Wuthering Heights than it does in a book set in the ’90s. While Donny has its problems, and the city centre can be as grim as it is described here, all the auxiliary characters aside from the main trio feel like caricatures, cartoonish even, and while everyone’s perception of their home town is different, and people are entitled to that perception, the portrayal of Doncaster, whilst sometimes absolutely spot on, also often didn’t ring true for me. That being said, this isn’t an autobiography, it’s a work of fiction meant to entertain, question and awaken long dormant emotions. It’s a howl of anguish, and a giddy celebration of teen female friendships, and when judged by those metrics, the book is undoubtedly a success.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is an incredibly assured novel for a debut writer, and despite my misgivings, of course I’m delighted that a writer from my hometown is receiving so much praise. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a voice from a forgotten northern city making a splash in the wider literary world, and I can imagine that this will become an essential text for women all over northern England and beyond.