This was a really interesting experimental work with the text forming different shapes on each page, and requiring great concentration to focus on the different threads of the narrative. I'm not sure it completely worked for me but I did feel pulled along by the writing and a real sense of urgency in the relating of the story and the emotions it engendered in the woman.
Thank you to netgalley and Faber and Faber for an advance copy of this book.

Little Scratch was an interesting, thought-provoking and innovative debut novel. The style is extremely experimental, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I really enjoyed it. I think I may have missed out slightly re. formatting, because the document sent was a Microsoft Word Document, and so the view on my Kindle changed/glitched occasionally. I definitely think it is a book to be read in its physical form. It’s an insightful account of one day in the life of a woman who has just suffered sexual assault. You glean information over the course of the day, and she goes into the minutiae of everyday life - which sounds boring, but I found both fascinating and comforting. Although I haven’t suffered from as severe a sexual assault as rape, I have a certain amount of first-hand experience of sexual trauma/PTSD, and found that the protagonist’s experience somewhat reflected my own, and some elements of her personal life. I would definitely both purchase this and keep an eye out for anything Watson does next.

This book is really original and I admire the author for attempting something so ambitious while tackling a really emotive topic.

Sadly I found the format too distracting and difficult to decipher to be able to fully invest in what was going on.

I’d be interested to listen to the audio of this to see how the experience differs.

Many thanks for gifting me this copy to review.

An experimental novel that initially I found difficult until I’d come to terms with the authors method of conveying, in writing, a distressed and confused mind.
A stream of consciousness novel that is both enthralling and challenging. It details a day in the life of a woman trying to cope with a traumatic event. To convey the confused mind words are muddled, repeated and sometimes spread across the page like confetti.
She carries on with normal day to day matters, trying to cope, while all the time going over what happened and there’s the constant scratching at the skin, the self harm, perhaps trying to remove all traces of the incident.
The book is complex and intense so find yourself a quiet place and put up a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.

A very clever book that uses an experimental mismatched stream of consciousness narrative to process the difficult theme of sexual assault.

This book was really different. It was thought provoking and well thought out. I feel the book was best read in one sitting due to the nature of the style. The themes were hard hitting, and the idea as a whole was unique, making for a very interesting read from a novelist that clearly has great deal of potential. I look forward to seeing what she writes next.

Thank you Net Galley, the writer and publisher for the advance copy.

Little Scratch is an insight into the thoughts that run through our main protagonist’s head through the course of one day after she has experienced sexual trauma. Because they are her thoughts, we read a stream of consciousness. Sometimes repetitive & sometimes distracting which made sense as she was trying to suppress what had happened to her. But, the format of the book is confusing, it’s messy and the structure is hard to read as there were multiple thoughts running at the same time and they read from left to right and up and down. I was getting really frustrated so I did what I never do and went to Goodreads to see what other people thought. Someone recommended reading it quickly. Our thoughts tend to come at a mile a minute so maybe this book needs to be read fast too. Our character was suffering from trauma so it made sense for her thoughts to be rapid and all over the place.

Reading quickly helped...a little.

But not enough.

I appreciate and recognise the risk that the author took in setting the book up like this and I think it’s a great idea but as someone who can’t multitask and is generally quite a slow thinker, it was way too much work for such little pay off. I would, however, listen to this on audio as I imagine the frantic thoughts would come across well if they were heard.

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.

There was a lot to enjoy about Little Scratch, mostly to do with the wry observations on every day life and its handling of sexual assault. There were bright moments when dealing with these areas, but unfortunately the book fell slightly flat everywhere else. Although the prose-in-verse/ fragments was ambitious, I don't think it completely worked. I understand that Watson was showing thought patterns and processes in relation to actions (as well as thought processes by themselves), but sometimes the fragmentation of lines just didn't make sense.

This will certainly be a divisive novel, and there will no doubt be many who see the genius in it -- it's a shame I can't be one of them.

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 was really looking forward to reading this book, however the format in which it downloaded onto my Kindle made it wholly unreadable. I even deleted it and downloaded again but this did not remedy the issue and so I cannot really give any helpful review as to the novel itself which is unfortunate. Reading others' reviews leads me to believe that it was not my Kindle at fault but the unusual way it has been formatted. Perhaps I will pick this up in paperback at some time in the future as I am really open to experimental forms of writing. The only reason I give it one star is because I was unable to read it.

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.