This is an amazing book. Bina, a 74 year old woman facing serious criminal charges is writing her story on scraps of paper in order to provide warnings to other women. It's a stream of consciousness process. It takes a while to understand what Bina is trying to say; to understand what happened and is happening. But stick with it and you will be richly rewarded.

This book is about compassion for the dying and is a tribute to female friendship; Bina's relationship with Phil is the prime example of that. But the whole concept of the book is a tribute to sisterhood as Bina tries to warn other women and to support them in deciding when they've had enough.

The style provides some challenges but is the perfect way to tell Bina's story. ( )

Novels work when what authors write sounds like when real people speak.
But Bina.
Oh Bina.
Bina keeps talking.
A lot of it is confusing.
Until you figure out what Bina is saying.
Or most of it, anyway.
But by then it is so tedious.
That it is hard to care.
And you just wish she never started talking. ( )

Atypical writing style, but it works really well to slowly reveal the conflict. Not suitable for picking up and putting down over weeks but good to read in stretches. Bina's distress and grief over Phil commands a lot of sympathy. I felt so sad for her. You can't blame her for taking Eddie in or letting herself be trained by the Tall Man. (is it a coincidence that Tallman is also a reference to labelling protocol in pharmaceuticals?) The stream of consciousness style is great, but I am unsure of the purpose of the sporadic third person narrator. To ground the story? Stop it from flying away? Reassure the reader that someone else is also watching Bina and knows her? Is it the Tall Man? The Crusties help the reader, let's us know Bina does have people supporting her even if she feels utterly alone and helpless. ( )

*I received a copy of this book through the Goodreads Giveaway program in exchange for an honest review*

My rating for Bina is somewhere between a 2.5 and 3 - I didn't dislike the book, however I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. The author definitely has a poetic, abstract writing style and I found it easy to read (although I doubt I read it at the depth intended). There were references throughout to the author's earlier book, Malarkey, and I am now curious to read it as well.

This is an intriguing, curious read for anyone who has the time and mental energy (I tend to have to be alert to follow the unique writing style/prose). ( )

I loved this novel. It will not be to everyone’s liking, but I found it a compelling read.

Bina (pronounced Bye-na) is an angry 74-year-old woman who has “had enough.” From her bed, on discarded envelopes and receipts, she writes her story: “I was always remarking to myself, but now I’m doing my remarking in a more formal capacity for yourselves, and for after I’m gone, and I am very glad of it. For it has been a long life of being talked at, often unintelligently, and at this late hour in the departure lounge of life, I am happy to do the full remarking aloud and down onto these papers.”

Bina tells us about Eddie who inserted himself into her life for a decade during which time “Within these four walls it was persistence, it was never living.” She calls him an “ordeal creator” who became violent and used her property for criminal activities: “The man is a lying hoar. He has lied far and wide and double-eared for 10 years. He’ll lie til the pyramids are fully eroded and rebuilt in Lego.” She is overjoyed that he is gone but is ever fearful that he will return.

Bina introduces us to the Tall Man who recruited her into a group; “What he wanted me to do eventually became a mountain of woe and had me sent inside prison for a week.” Now she is awaiting trial on serious charges. Members of the group, whom she calls Crusties, are camped out in her yard: “They are outside camping with their clipboards, in case the Guards come for me.”

Bina had two friends, Tomás and Phil, but both are gone so she finds herself very much alone. She has decided to write her story to warn people not to repeat her mistakes; she feels she has “been handed this here undertaking. To. Deliver. These. Warnings. I am a practical woman, there’s nothing I like more than to be useful and this here makes me useful.” In fact, much of what she writes consists of warnings. For example, “if you are thinking of opening your hearth or your heart. Don’t.” and “I would warn you never to disclose your dark thoughts but to constantly disclose your truthful thoughts, because it’s only the dark ones that follow when the truthful ones are hid.” and “Don’t do the things you’re not supposed to do. Even if people ask you to do them. Don’t.” and “Another warning: Careful what you think you are hiding, as it’s probably on full view. Careful not to hide suffering because you are only making more work for the people who have yet to discover it.” and “Sacrifice is a stupid thing that women do. Don’t do it. The men don’t notice.”

Bina also writes her conclusions about life based on what she has experienced. She comments on various topics like ageism (“I’m not a young person so I am used to being ignored”) and media (“It’s a funny thing when the papers write about you or the TV tells about you, but they have not talked to you. . . . They give you a voice based on what they believe your actions are. They talk about you like they are speculating through binoculars”) and the treatment of women (“They were not giving up because I was a woman and I was grabable”). She mentions that “There’s nothing quite as confusing as yourself, I concluded. This is likely why so many of us succumb to absolute confusion, the dementia, in the end.” and “if you tell people the truth they won’t believe you, but tell them lies and they’ll believe all of it.” and “We cannot know every reason a person has for doing a thing.”

There are some wonderful touches of humour:
“A man though, he could get into your kidneys and irritate them & you in a very special way. It’s why women are up in the night to go to the toilet as they age. They are widdling the confused strain of anger gathered up in there all day. I’ve no explanation as to why men are up piddling all night too, except perhaps it’s God’s subtle way of tormenting them. He goes straight for the pipe does our Saviour.”
and
“There’s a new fella out there, the lanky looper I call him, with a thin face and a long beard that might have food gone relic inside it. He has it twisted down to a point and a red elastic band put on it with a bead or three, and he looks surgically demented. I don’t care what you put on yourself. I wouldn’t care if you tattooed a droopy spider on your baldhead like a lampshade, but a grown man with three pink beads hanging from his chin is disturbing.”
and
When her lawyer tells her to watch her words because “’You’re going to scupper us all if you keep this up,’” she thinks, “Last I checked there are no double berths for the convicted and their solicitors in any prison in this country.”

Because the style is unconventional, the narrative is fractured. Bina circles around events without fully explaining herself so it takes a while to understand, for example, what work she actually did with the group. She says that she is being vague so she doesn’t implicate herself; because of legal reasons, she “cannot articulate without getting in trouble.” She repeats herself to emphasize her message but also because she is forgetful. She admits that “My memory isn’t great so you may have to read a few things twice” and bemoans how “A name, a word, a meaning, a person, it’s all unthreading and blowing out the backdoor of my mind.” She often addresses the reader directly: “Don’t forget, when you can’t remember, it’ll come back to you.” Sometimes he speaks about herself in the third person.

There are sections which read more like poetry than prose:
I panicked too much.
It’s been a lifetime of panic. Eddie would make you panic. It’s how he is.
Sirenic.
Claxonic.
Awful.
Awful.
Awful.
At times the language reminded of e e cumming’s poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town”: “This wasn’t unusual heard. It wasn’t unusual to hear it. You could not at all it. You could not at all them. But you couldn’t eradicate the thought of it. You couldn’t get at the part of them that had started to feel it or had maybe felt it all their lives. You wouldn’t even know what someone felt all their lives and whether it was now or then they were feeling it and when was then and how was now? Maybe they could barely arrive at now because of then.”

This would probably be considered a difficult book. Early on, Bina actually mentions this:
But this hasn’t been a difficult book yet.
Bina’s not for difficult books.
Life is full of difficulty, so if she were ever to lie down and take up a book, it couldn’t be a difficult one.
I’d never read that rubbish, she’d say of this book.
It would give me bad dreams.

Despite the book’s challenging style, serious subject and often melancholic tone, I highly recommend it. Bina’s voice is one you will not soon forget.

Note: I received a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )