Girlchild (eBook)
Girlchild (eBook)
$9.99
Description
Rory Hendrix is the least likely of Girl Scouts. She hasn’t got a troop or even a badge to call her own. But she’s checked the Handbook out from the elementary school library so many times that her name fills all the lines on the card, and she pores over its surreal advice (Uniforms, disposing of outgrown; The Right Use of Your Body; Finding Your Way When Lost) for tips to get off the Calle: that is, the Calle de las Flores, the Reno trailer park where she lives with her mother, Jo, the sweet-faced, hard-luck bartender at the Truck Stop.
Rory’s been told that she is one of the “third-generation bastards surely on the road to whoredom.” But she’s determined to prove the county and her own family wrong. Brash, sassy, vulnerable, wise, and terrified, she struggles with her mother’s habit of trusting the wrong men, and the mixed blessing of being too smart for her own good. From diary entries, social workers’ reports, half-recalled memories, arrest records, family lore, Supreme Court opinions, and her grandmother’s letters, Rory crafts a devastating collage that shows us her world even as she searches for the way out of it.
Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild is a heart-stopping and original debut.
About the Author
Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia’s MFA program. Her writing has been published in the Portland Review Literary Journal, Paper Street Press, Tantalum, We Still Like, and Zyzzyva, and by 100 Word Story, Five Chapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours.
Praise for Girlchild…
“A voice as fresh as hers is so rare that at times I caught myself cheering. . . .I’d go anywhere with this writer.”---Susannah Meadows, The New York Times “So fresh, original, and funny you’ll be in awe… Tupelo Hassman has created a character you’ll never forget. Rory Dawn Hendrix of the Calle has as precocious and endearing a voice as Holden Caulfield of Central Park.”---The Boston Globe “A lyrical and fiercely accomplished first novel...In Hassman’s skilled hands, what could have been an unrelenting chronicle of desolation becomes a lovely tribute to the soaring, defiant spirit of a survivor.”---People “Moments of strange beauty enhance our sense of the Calle community….[Hassman] makes Rory’s milieu feel universal.”---Megan Mayhew Bergman, The New York Times Book Review “Powerful…Rory transcends her bleak situation through dark humor and unaccountable smarts.”---San Francisco Chronicle “This amazing debut spills over with love, but is still absolutely unflinching and real.”---Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake