There are books that ask you to read them, and there are books that simply happen to you. Songs of a Barber’s Tuesday: Full Full Girl belongs firmly to the second kind.
Tony wakes one ordinary morning to find himself changed into a girl. Not a disguise, not a dream, but a full transformation. He is now an attractive young woman carrying, intact, the memories of the man he was the night before. There is no explanation offered, no gentle easing-in. He is confused, frightened, and entirely unmoored, and Abhimanyu Jamwal refuses to let him – or us – look away.
What lifts this premise beyond its own strangeness is the form. Jamwal has written the whole novel in verse, and framed it around the simplest scene imaginable: a girl walks into a barber’s shop on a Tuesday morning, and while her hair is being cut, she tells him the story of her life. That is the entire architecture. On paper it should not hold. In practice it is remarkable how much weight so slight a frame can bear.
“This shame of nakedness within him did not lie
But was found in others’ eye
The neighbours, shopkeepers Jobseekers and even Future Wife
Funny! Nobody cared when he was a boy
As a non existent, he used to walk by
But now, they demanded a view
As if his body owed their eyes an excise
As if denying them a sight
Was an infringement of their civil right
As if being an object of pleasure was dignified
Or being subjected to lust and disgust”
I will be honest. It took me a few lines to find the rhythm. In my years auditing loan books, I learned to distrust anything that flows too easily; smoothness usually hides something. But a few pages in, my scepticism gave way. The words move like a stream, each line clean and deliberate, and there is no stopping once the current has you. I read most of it in a single sitting, Little Miss curled against my side, tugging at my Kindle device before I had quite finished reading.
The tragedy of Tony is handled with real tenderness. An identity revalued overnight is, in the coldest terms, an exposure no one hedged against. Everything Tony assumed about his standing in the world is repriced in a moment, and the market, as ever, is merciless. Jamwal is unsparing about how society reads and reshapes a woman, how swiftly the world adjusts its terms once the collateral changes. And yet the book never curdles into misery. Small dashes of comedy arrive exactly when the weight becomes too much, and they are all the sharper for the darkness around them.
That balance, grief and comedy held in the same steady hand, is the book’s quiet triumph. It would have been easy to write this as a curiosity, a novelty premise stretched thin over a few pages. Instead it reads as a genuine meditation on identity, belonging, and the arbitrary cruelties of the ledger we are all sorted into.
If you have never read a verse novel, this is a generous place to begin. Give it those first few lines. Let the current take you. You will not, I think, come out quite the same.
My rating: 4/5
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