About The Book
Book: We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
Author: Colwill Brown
Standalone or Series: Standalone
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication Date (UK): 20th February 2025
My Review
This debut novel follows three adolescent girls coming of age in a gritty post-industrial Yorkshire town in the ‘90s.
This isn’t the usual kind of book I would review here but I’m so glad I did. I’ve never seen so much of my own childhood reflected in a book before. I was highlighting passages left, right and centre because so much rang true. The girls in the book start secondary school in ‘98, while I was just a year behind and 50 miles up the M62.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is written entirely in Donny (that’s Doncaster, South Yorkshire) vernacular and it was a joy to see words like sozzard and plaggy bag in print. At times, it made the novel feel a little long, but at the same time I didn’t want it to end.
Get ready to meet bezzies Rach, Kel and Shaz, as the novel shifts between their perspectives, from childhood into their thirties. You’ll follow them through under-18s club nights, trying to get into Gatecrasher, how to survive secondary and blend in, threats of being banged out, comparing relationships and what’s expected of them and when, trips to family planning, the pill and its effects on their bodies – this is such an accurate depiction of life in the North as a teenage girl in the ‘90s.
Here are just a few of the moments I highlighted:
🖊️ “She shrugged on her backpack wi her free arm, looping only one strap over one shoulder. She’s already learned ont bus that you can’t wear two straps at big school because two straps wa for pricks.”
Yes. Absolutely this.
🖊️ “Slab of chocolate concrete submerged on pink custard.”
The horror of school dinners. I used to be given a packed lunch and then sell it to buy chips or—if I was feeling healthy—half an iced bun from the bakery opposite school
🖊️ “Wa there summat wrong wi me? Or had Kel and Shaz just decided they wa gunna start fancying lads? They kept ‘top tens’ in a jotter.”
Again – this could be me! I wasn’t interested until my late teens.
🖊️ “People turn to poison quick as lager turns to piss, sweethearts are physically sick every time they kiss. That wa Kel’s favourite week in English, when they’d read this bloke who Sir reckoned warra poet, but his poems warrabout real things – drugs and drinking, fucking and fighting.”
Growing up in Hull, our version of this was Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
🖊️ “Pint of Diesel?” Rach asked, remembering what you drank when you wa sixteen, mix of cider, lager, and blackcurrant cordial.”
My drink of choice – and good to see it called by its proper name instead of Snakebite and Black!
This book is raw, funny and heartbreakingly real. If you grew up in the North in the ‘90s, I’d be shocked if you don’t see either yourself or the lasses and lads from school in it.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is available to pre-order now and is out on the 20th February, with thanks to Vintage Books for my gifted copy.
Beth Reads Crime 
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