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My Name is Yip: Shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize

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Short (I'm guessing 4 feet tall), completely hairless and mute, he's written off as an 'idiot' freak and not so much shunned as totally ignored. Overall I’m glad I read this book and I enjoyed it, but I don’t feel inclined to read it again or recommend it to everyone I know.

I had thought this book was historical fiction, but it was more of fiction than realistic or historical. I liked the way the events and thoughts, such as the fate of a slave and Yip's reaction to it, are underplayed, which make them all the more powerful.Parrick, he was not one to waste his words but spoke of my demise as plainly as of some turn in the weather.

The images still flowing through my mind as if it were a movie I'd just finished watching, i felt every bit invested in the journey of Yip Tolroy that when it came to an end i really felt it, I'm sad there's no more pages to turn. Both an entertaining tale of gold, murder and the impulse for revenge, and a tender coming-of-age story amid the lawlessness of the American frontier.My Name Is Yip has been longlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the 2023 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and Authors Club Best First Novel Award, and shortlisted for the 2023 Betty Trask Prize.

It’s also a rollicking, page-turning wild west adventure, populated by a cast of arresting grotesques, with luminous imagery and an unforgettable protagonist. My Name Is Yip is a tremendous novel, one that both harks back and burns the way forward, that is built of sentences that sing and roar. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.And, as Yip and Dud’s odyssey takes them further into the unknown – via travelling shows, escaped slaves and the greed of gold-hungry men – the pull of home only gets stronger. I do think some of the stylistic choices were unnecessary and will likely deter some readers at the very beginning (as it almost did with me) - for example the use of the ampersand in replacement for the word 'and' throughout the whole book, the strange use of capital letters at the beginning of some words. Yip Tolroy, being mute, may not have a voice in the conventional sense of the word, but he makes himself heard in the very essence of his character, in this wonderful debut novel, that in itself yells to be heard! There are several moving moments and ruminations on the meaning and nature of life in this brutal society where there is a casualness to the death and violence which seem endemic to it.

I thought there were a few minor flaws, but they were easily forgiven as I was swept along on a galloping wild ride. I am looking forward to Paddy Crewe's second novel which, one suspects, will be a sequel, filling in the details of Yip's adventures, marriage and later life.I thought I would really like this book, it checks off so many items of interest, but I couldn't feel or muster any connection to what I was reading, unfortunately. I also felt like this story had no concept of time and I couldn’t tell how long Yip was away from home.

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