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All friendships shift and change through the years—and even the closest of bonds can sometimes weaken with time. And We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by author Colwill Brown follows three girls as they try to stick together through the hardest parts of growing up.
The story explores the lives of three best friends from Doncaster, a city in South Yorkshire, England. Rach, Shaz, and Kel have been best friends since they were young. They all have different personalities and different roles to play in their friendship, but they’ve always been there for each other through every important (and not-so-important) moment as they’ve grown up—or so they’ve always thought. But as they grow and change and grow apart through the years, there are long-held secrets and suppressed emotions that build a wedge between them.
Written entirely in a heavy Yorkshire dialect, often jumping back and forth through time and from one perspective to another, this novel can be challenging and time-consuming to read—especially because you’ll need to translate the words as you go. But it gives the story a kind of authenticity that you don’t often see in novels. It’s raw and rough and direct, telling the story from the characters’ perspectives, in their own voices.
For these three eager but uncertain young Donny lasses, their close friendship allows them to explore and experiment, knowing that, whatever happens to them—whether they aren’t able to get into that club or they get into a fight in the parking lot—they have friends who care about them and will take care of them. Their adventures don’t always end well—and, sometimes, they just have to learn life lessons along the way. But, despite their differences—and the challenges in their friendships—they almost never have to learn these lessons alone.
Still, this isn’t a fluffy, idealized portrait of female friendship. There are always tensions boiling beneath the surface—the fears, the insecurities, the doubts, and even the mistrust. There are some things that they feel that they just can’t talk about—and those secrets and fears, those things held back, add an honest uneasiness to this story of female friendships through the challenges of life.
If you’ve ever turned on the subtitles on movies or TV shows just to help you understand foreign characters’ dialects, you may struggle with the heavily-accented writing style of this coming-of-age novel. It’s certainly a challenging read—not just because of its language but also because of its sometimes brutal honesty. But it’s a real and memorable portrait of friendship through the years.
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