She dives forward, her bat scraping past the crease before the ball knocks the stumps. The crowd sighs in relief — it is only the second over. You turn your attention back to Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel But the Girl. There, Yu writes ‘when I was a teenager, I had thought there was nothing more embarrassing in the whole world than being a teenage girl.’ You glance back at the match. But these girls aren’t embarrassed, they are fierce, vying for their spot in the next game. They know exactly what they want to be and how to get there. Your younger self, a bundle of insecurity, slinks back into the shadows.

The unnamed protagonist Girl is intensely relatable — thinking about everything except the task at hand. She’s supposed to be working on her postcolonial novel at an artist residency in Scotland, but instead her mind wavers and wanders between her family’s history, her memories and her identity in the social world. Her thoughts come at you like doors thrown open, questions echoing like pistol shots. You half expect to see your journal entries when you turn the page. No wonder you are restless on the grass, afraid that an unsuspecting stranger will read the next passage before you do. Girl’s performance is yours: her scholarship smile for the panel, her choreographed replies for her peers, her silence for her family. Girl is cruel, airing out your dirty laundry like this. Girl is ungrateful; you’d kill for the opportunities she has. Girl needs a hug.