This stream of consciousness novel explores an Irish girl's relationship with her disabled brother, religious mother, and her own troubled sexuality.

Joshua Cohen described how McBride's experimental style "forgoes quotation marks and elides verbiage for sense, sound and sheer appearance on the page.

[3] Mr Layte, of Galley Beggar Press recalled that the unusual writing-style led him to take up the novel where others had overlooked it:I thought this was one of the most important books I had ever read.

Eimear McBride prose is a visceral throb, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words, freed from the tedious march of sequence, seem to want to merge with one another, as paint and musical notes can.

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing makes that rapturous lament By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept look like Hotel du Lac.

"[11] Annie Galvin for Los Angeles Review of Books stated that "to read the opening paragraph of Eimear McBride’s novel is to be radically disoriented.

"[12] NPR book reviewer Heller McAlpin advice to the readers is to "be prepared to be blown away by this raw, visceral, brutally intense neomodernist first novel.

There's nothing easy about Eimear McBride's novel, from its fractured language to its shattering story of the young unnamed narrator's attempt to drown mental anguish with physical pain.