Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC.

*Little Scratch* is a stream of consciousness novel and is therefore a short and quick read. I read it in one sitting and was sucked into the narrative and all the main character's thoughts. I enjoyed the format and the writing style. The layout of the pages of the ebook was very confusing, though – there were lines around and sometimes through the text which made it difficult to read. I hope this gets sorted out before publication.

The main character's thoughts and experiences around office politics were very relatable. I have definitely spent time in offices very similar to this one.

The thoughts on rape are also [so depressingly] relatable. I am sure that many of us have had very similar thoughts about something that happened to us, and to what extent it "counts" as sexual assault or rape. These thoughts recur numerous times through the day recounted in this book, so keep in mind the appropriate trigger warnings.

Overall this book is perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon with a cup of tea, or an evening after a busy workday. Would recommend.

I wanted to love this book- I thought it was going to be lyrical (akin to pets of Saltwater which I read earlier in the year or Grief is the Thing with Feathers) but I found the format a little too experimental/radical. As such I couldn’t build a picture that allowed me to become lost in story. This may be personal taste and others may really enjoy it (I’m thinking of Milkman which was critically acclaimed but not my favourite read). Not for me, I’m afraid but grateful to have had the opportunity to read.

4 stars

This was honestly really good. The writing style takes a bit to get into, but it adds so much to the story; there's no question that this isn't going to be one of the biggest reads of 2021. While I am fortunate enough to have never experienced what the main character has, I have gone through trauma, and I have been the person who needed to talk themselves through every single tiny task of the day in order to get through it. Could not recommend this enough, but as always, be aware of the content warnings.

A fantastic debut
Poignant and powerful, this immersive character study follows a group of strangers in the aftermath of a bus crash in a rural Irish town. It starts as an ordinary morning, but then the road collapses and a bus falls into it, trapping six passengers. As firefighters try to find the safest way to free them we follow three of the passengers, the driver and passenger who managed to escape, a journalist and her firefighter ex-husband. The author gives us a window into their lives and innermost thoughts, examining topics such as grief, mental health, identity, race, religion, homelessness and how our society judges, even if in the midst of a tragedy.

While I enjoyed this book, it was a very different book than I imagined, in part because I feel the synopsis is misleading. It reads like this will be a tense book that has you on the edge of your seat but is instead a steadily paced story that uses the bus crash as the catalyst that brings the characters together and focuses on deeper issues. Moving between multiple points of view, we are offered some contrasting and varying views on life and the world, with each person dealing with their part in the story in very different ways.

There is a former couple still dealing with the loss of their baby daughter and the end of their marriage, an immigrant struggling to fit in and find her place in the cultures of either her birth or adopted home, the bus driver who doesn't feel worthy of his hero title, a disabled young woman dreaming of her future but also scared, wondering when rescue will come, a young woman trying to find her place in the world and battling against a toxic parent, and a teenage boy dealing with all the trauma that time brings. They are an eclectic and wonderfully written group of characters who make for fascinating reading. The background cast enhance the main characters and are just as well written, adding drama and tension to the story.

This is a fantastic debut novel. The author's talent is evident in her intelligent and moving prose, the way she offers just the right amount of humour, offering much-needed splashes of light amongst the overall darker tone of the story, and her keen observations. I'm excited to see what she writes next.

I'm so sorry but I have to give this the lowest rating because it was impossible to read on my Kindle. Font was too small. I attempted to make it bigger but the format didn't fit on the page and kept reverting to the smaller font. Such a shame as I was looking forward to reading it. Hope the publisher can rectify the issue before the ebook is published.

I gave this book a good go but I just couldn’t connect with the narrative.
I get that this is a purposeful stream of consciousness and I have read other books written in prose but this one just didn’t work for me. The short, sharp and fragmented text prevented me feeling engrossed and I didn’t have that lure to read just one more page.

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.

Set over the course of a full, single, day in a working week this brief, poetic novel is linguistically stark, yet emotionally complex in depicting a person living with trauma.
We start at daybreak and are propelled through a the daily grind of a recognisable (but bleak!) existence of an unfulfilled office worker. Through commute, her lunchtime soup, toilet breaks, a poetry reading in the back of a bookstore and pints with her boyfriend, the protagonists' spare internal monologue is muffling thoughts about a recent (?) sexual abuse and the compulsive behaviour that the trauma has manifested, an obsessive scratching of her legs that she tries to avoid thinking about but keeps going back to, wanting to just give herself a 'little scratch'.
The book is typeset in a way that is both visually beautiful and a little confronting, but once you've got a handle on it, it feels like reading the thoughts of someone thinking one thing and seeing or hearing another or having two concurrent and conflicting thoughts- something we do everyday, but rarely see in prose. Sometimes I found the typesetting distracting or confusing, but generally I found it very affecting.
It is an emotional read, I found much of the book painful and frustrating on the characters' behalf- but it is funny too, there is a lot of humour within the text and that made me feel somewhat hopeful for the character.
Although writers before have written similarly challenging prose (there are echoes of Ellman, McBride, Ginsberg, Woolf and most comparably for the over-the-course-of-a-single-day structure, Joyce) the style still feels somewhat experimental. It is an experiment that is, largely, successful. It's exciting to read something so brave in style that manages to fulfil a narrative and an emotional landscape too.

I loved the concept of this book and the powerfully emotive subject but I have to admit the format made it a difficult read. This may be because it is an ARC on an e-reader, I don't know.

In places this is brilliant. The stream of consciousness flows and you just jump right into the characters head. At other times I think some of the story gets lost in the layout.

The story itself is spot on. That drudge of the everyday whilst dealing with a massive issue or trauma is something everyone will recognise. The focus on the mundane, the routine of work and then every so often, bam, it hits you.

I really want to read something else by this author.

I thought this was quite a unique book in the storytelling method it took to clue the reader in on what was going on, but I really liked it. Even with the subject matter, I thought it worked and had me hooked. Four stars.

Little Scratch was not what I was expecting. I'd heard very good things about it, and I knew it was experimental, but it was a much tougher read than I thought it was going to be. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's harder going than other recent experimental novels I've read.  That's possibly also due to the subject matter -- little scratch follows an unnamed woman across 24 hours, in the aftermath of a sexual assault. Not only does it follow her: it maps every thought she has in the 24 hours. Some of her thoughts are more coherent than others, some are unfinished, some are mundane snapshots of her day. It's distracting and moving, and very clever.

I was pleased to be approved for this book as it sounded intriguing.

It is written in an experimental style using the stream of consciousness technique. I am sorry to say I did not enjoy this book, but I am sure the fault was all mine as a reader. The format and layout means that it is difficult to follow any formal narrative. The words are all over the page and I found it impossible to string together any logical story. I can see from the blurb that the narrator is processing a sexual violent attack against the humdrum existence of an ordinary day. The language used is strong and insistent, which I found disturbing and unnecessary.

Little Scratch is a compelling stream of consciousness novella, following an unnamed protagonist through one day in the office.

It's a fraught and sensitive exploration of sexual trauma. I often find experimental forms alienating, but somehow Watson strikes the perfect balance between free-fall and fragmentation. I got caught up in the flow of it and read it all in one sitting.

Emotionally fraught and compulsive, Little Scratch is a little book that packs a lot of punch.

Although interesting, the format of this novel made it hard for me to actually enjoy it, instead it felt like a chore and I was glad that it’s rather short. As a result of this unusual format, it’s probably not a book for everyone.

However this original format could be ground breaking for other readers and I have to say that the subject matter is important.

I love a stream of consciousness narrative (and a one day novel!) so much, and I’ve read lots, but I have to say that Watson’s gives one the best representations of consciousness that I’ve seen. It’s incredibly close to the way that brains work - or the way that mine does anyway - with the darting and layering of thoughts, of multiple ideas of different levels of importance, relevance and clarity happening simultaneously. It reminded me a little of Peach by Emma Glass, which also deals with the trauma of assault, but I enjoyed it far more, possibly because Watson weaves little burst of humour and humanity in so well. You leave the novel not even knowing the name of the first person protagonist but rooting for her all the same.

I loved the concept of this book. It is unlike anything else I have every read, it wasn't an easy read but that's part of what makes it good and important.

‪I feel like a lot of novels are branded ‘inventive’ but little scratch genuinely is. Not everyone will appreciate it and I imagine that it will polarise opinion but I’m firmly a fan.

I read the ebook on my phone which I initially thought was going to be a mistake (and I worried that it would do a disservice to the novel) but I soon found that it actually suited the formatting and pacing in that I absolutely raced through it‬. I then read it again in case I’d missed anything the first time!

Despite the hard hitting subject matter (a woman dealing with the aftermath of being raped by her boss) Watson also includes flashes of office-based black humour that reminded me of the work of Halle Butler.

‪I’d recommend that you read it in as few bursts as possible, then read it again‬. The New Me meets Emma Glass’s Peach meets Ducks, Newburyport.

Hmm, this is a hard one to review because Watson is striving to do something fresh here in attempting to give voice to experience. The topic of sexual trauma is always an important one, and it's complicated here by issues of #metoo power and powerlessness, as well as the impact of rape on an existing loving relationship and with the victim's own body.

While I applaud the way this book approaches a crucial topic of our moment, I didn't feel that the writerly choices made here really move the articulation of experience on. The much-vaunted form of 'stream-of-consciousness' gets bandied around a lot in reviews but, strictly speaking, this is more a free-form internal voice: I don't recognise it as the noise in my head, for example, as this is too grammatically formed, too self-aware and conscious, even laughing at its own little jokes. It's also the case that (and I realise there's no easy way to do this) experience is still translated into words, we're still listening to a mind speaking to itself, not experiencing what happens to a body which might be where the book was trying to go.

It is interesting to use columns to structure parallel events, so one column to quote e.g. reading of texts on the commute while another is the inner commentary on them but the book doesn't escape its own textuality. At times, this feels like an almost send-up of Woolf mashed up with Plath.

A striking experiment, if not completely successful to this reader. Well done, though, to the author and Faber & Faber for taking a risk on this.

A tough book to review. On one hand I feel like this would be a really easy book to critique. But on the other hand, the risks the author took in terms of writing this are very clear - it's a courageous book in form, style, and theme. In many ways, it is DARING you to find it self-indulgent, which is an interesting position to put the reader in. Dare to take me seriously, the book is saying (at least to me). And that deserves credit and acknowledgement. It made me think of this David Graeber quote: "If we really want to understand the moral grounds of economic life, and, by extension, human life, it seems to me that we must start instead with the very small things." I would be interested in seeing what the author writes next.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.