My enormous thanks to Ned at FMcM for sending me a copy of How to be a French Girl by Rose Cleary in return for an honest review. I was disappointed not to be able to participate in the blog tour, but with my Mum’s 90th birthday celebrations, her continuing illness and going away for our 40th wedding anniversary, I simply couldn’t fit it in. However, I’m delighted to share my review today.

Published by Weatherglass on 10th August 2023, How to be a French Girl is available for purchase here.

How to be a French Girl

If you no longer want to be you, be careful who you become.

She’s from Southend. She wanted to be an artist and ended up at the best art school in the country. But that didn’t work out.

Now she works as a receptionist in an IT firm, where her only creative outlet is arranging the sandwiches she’s ordered in for other people’s meetings. And she still lives in Southend.

Outside work, soulless sex has become a symptom of her boredom.

Then Gustav appears: older, perceptive, attentive. And French.

He’s her way out, she thinks. But more than that, a chance to be creative again: to become someone new.

How to be a French Girl is a fierce, disturbing and funny debut novel about desire, art and what we’ll risk to change ourselves.

My Review of How to be a French Girl

The girl wants her life to change.

Brimming with ennui that is pitch perfect, the atmosphere in How to be a French Girl is mesmerising as Rose Cleary illustrates the modern condition of loneliness and the need to be someone – anyone – with razor sharp accuracy. 

This is a kind of road crash of a book you want to read through your fingers as the protagonist spirals into more desperate and mad behaviour. I found myself exclaiming aloud, begging her not to take whatever action she was about to do. The image of her prosaic working life is astonishingly depicted. She is a small, nameless nobody in a huge corporation whom Rose Cleary ironically sees with total focus and wry humour. 

There’s a riveting sense that any one of us could descend into the madness of the girl in this story that makes reading How to be a French Girl hugely entertaining and not a little terrifying. This sensation is compounded by the fact the protagonist is never named. She is just a young woman, any young woman or an everywoman. There’s very much the sense that, if we were brave enough, or desperate enough, all of us could behave as she does. 

How to be a French Girl is written with such insight and skill. The lack of speech marks enhances the concept that the girl has no real place in society, as if she is not fully formed because even what she says is unformed. Similarly the lack of such punctuation gives the sensation of a lack of control; the concept that the girl could spin beyond the confines of convention at any moment. Add in her rash casual sexual liaisons, her stifled creative talent, her poverty and even her rotting tooth and throughout there is a tension as well as a dry, sardonic humour, suggesting that something is going to give.

I really enjoyed How to be a French Girl. It has both universality and individuality in a nuanced blend of convention and anarchy. I think it might divide readers, but I can’t envisage any reader not having an opinion as a result of Rose Cleary’s clever narrative. Try it for yourself! 

About Rose Cleary

Rose Cleary, born 1990, is an author and writer from Essex. Her writing has been previously published in New Socialist, The Southend’s Twilight Worlds, Hyperallergic and TOMA. She has exhibited her art internationally at galleries including Nahmad Projects and The Vaults in London, and Backlit Gallery in Nottingham. How to be a French Girl is her debut novel.

For further information, visit Rose’s website, follow her on Instagram.