Milkman

This was my favorite book the year I read it, and I will read it again, with no doubt the same result. The narrator is an anonymous 18-year-old woman navigating family, community, and romantic relationships in the midst of the Irish Troubles.

Almost every character is identified by a local nickname, part town culture and part a way to keep both authorities and rebels off track. I loved the strong writing and the surprising but always plausible twists. I’ve recommended it to every reader I know.

I loved this book because it tells the story of a young woman in a perilous political situation who doesn’t cave to horrifying violence or conform simply to stay safe. I admire the voice Burns creates for the main character, called “middle sister,” because it’s unlike any narration in any other novel. 

For me, the strangeness of middle sister’s narration gets at the disconnect between the way a young woman sees herself and the way the rest of the world sees her—as inconsequential, as a sexual object, as a target. I love the way that she thinks her way out… show more.

I heard Anna Burns read the first few pages of this book on a podcast just before her Booker win. The timber of her voice, the Irish accent, the nameless characters (first brother, second uncle, middle sister), and the seeming lack of punctuation turned her words into a kind of motor, filling her tiny body with a power incongruous with her size. It was so powerful that I ordered the book immediately. And it turns out that even on the page, the voice is everything.

Propulsive is an understatement; reading it is like being strapped into a carnival ride. It… show more.

In this case, I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator’s voice was so vivid, I felt like I was sitting in a front parlor in Northern Ireland, having a cup of tea, while this smart, thoughtful, and very self-aware young person told me her story.

I absolutely loved the specificity of the descriptions and the depth of thought in this book. The author did not stop with a simple depiction of a subject, but went deeper into its meaning to the main character and placed everything within the context of the Troubles and small-town mentality. I felt I got… show more.

A girl who grows up during The Troubles in Northern Ireland and is harassed by a man who comes to be known as Milkman – this is psychological terror as well as the already-present threat to one’s safety in extraordinarily difficult times.

Anna Burns makes everyday behaviors seem political, brilliantly creating an atmosphere of instability and mistrust while the protagonist, who remains unnamed, wants to cocoon herself from The Troubles. This book is an incredible read.

Anna Burns won the booker for this novel and rightly so. Burn plays with the norms of novel writing both in the unique voice she uses and in not giving any of her characters' names. It takes a page or two to get there but when you do it is a treat. We meet Middle Sister who is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her Maybe-Boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. Set in Belfast, this is a fabulous book, exploring teenage inhibition in the backdrop of troubles. It is funny and… show more.

The prose of Burns’s Milkman is astonishing and written with complete conviction. From the very first sentence, Milkman locks its reader into its world, its voice, its logic, its rhythms, and I find it thrilling to read a style that is so new and so absolutely demanded by its subject matter. In Burns’s understanding of the interplay of gender and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, there are dangers in seeing clearly or speaking forthrightly: there are questions of "...what females could say and what they could never say" (as her narrator observes). That danger resonates in the feeling that there… show more.