Name: Little Scratch
ISBN: 9780385545761

Rebecca Watson

"An experimental novel that reveals one young woman's every thought over the course of twenty-four hours"--

Little Scratch

Alexa M

Wow. The writing style was definitely jarring but fit the tone of a story about how disruptive trauma can be to one's daily life. A very unique reading experience.

This book is hard work and it took me a while to find the rhythm the author was getting across. The reward is well worth it and I couldn’t put it down toward the end. This is the first time reading a book written in this format and I found it very visual -like a picture book without the pictures supplied. I completely see this as something to be read multiple times with nuances to pick up at each pass. Again, hard work but so well rewarded for it.

Evil Lizzard

A painful, funny, vulnerable, endearing, rhythmic, horrible, and horribly lonely poem of novellength. It is as beautiful as it is jarring.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Post-modernist brilliance. Watson uses rhythm and form to recreate the transitory nature of the inner monologue. It skips, it falters, it circles. As it goes along a silence builds in the centre, around the one thing our narrator can't (not) think about and the way it evokes her thoughts ever drawn towards the trauma but skittering away it just brilliantly conceived. In it's cleverest moments (and it's ALL clever) the different strands of thought, interruption, conversation can be read in multiple ways as the interior and exterior world interplay. Not a word wasted, even the repetitions are masterfully judged. It's (deliberately) messy and confused and it's a masterclass in portraying human thought.

Maisie MacDonald

"Extraordinary"--THE NEW YORKER In the formally innovative tradition of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Ducks, Newburyport comes a dazzlingly original, shot-in-the-arm of a debut that reveals a young woman's every thought over the course of one deceptively ordinary day. She wakes up, goes to work. Watches the clock and checks her phone. But underneath this monotony there's something else going on: something under her skin. Relayed in interweaving columns that chart the feedback loop of memory, the senses, and modern distractions with wit and precision, our narrator becomes increasingly anxious as the day moves on: Is she overusing the heart emoji? Isn't drinking eight glasses of water a day supposed to fix everything? Why is the etiquette of the women's bathroom so fraught? How does she define rape? And why can't she stop scratching? Fiercely moving and slyly profound, little scratch is a defiantly playful look at how our minds function in--and survive--the darkest moments.

A Novel

little scratch

Mark

little scratch tells the story of a day in the life of an unnamed woman, living in a lower-case world of demarcated fridge shelves and office politics; clock-watching and WhatsApp notifications. In a voice that is fiercely wry, touchingly delicate and increasingly neurotic, the protagonist relays what it takes to get through the quotidian detail of that single trajectory - from morning to night - while processing recent sexual violence. little scratch is about the coexistence of monotony with our waking, intelligent lives. It is a powerful evocation of how the external and internal aspects of our lives exist in a helix, and what it means to live out the course of a single day consumed by trauma.

Little Scratch

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