Girlchild, a Different Kind of Debut Novel

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Recommended novel, recommended by The Deepeningby Tupelo Hassman

A debut novel, for one, and a different kind of novel, too. This isn’t your standard story, your standard formulaic novel, your easy, pleasant reader. This is new literature, and I think you’ll love it if you’re open to new and original approaches in literature. –D. L. Keur, The Deepening World of Books

AVAILABLE IN MULTIPLE FORMATS FROM AMAZON.COM

cover, Girlchild, a debut novelABOUT THIS DEBUT NOVEL

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.

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (February 14, 2012)
  • Language: English

ABOUT THIS DEBUT AUTHOR

Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia’s MFA program. Her writing has been published in Paper Street Press, The Portland Review Literary Journal, Tantalum, We Still Like, ZYZZYVA, and by 100WordStory.org and FiveChapters.com. Tupelo is a contributing author toHeliography, Invisible City Audio Tours’ first tour and is curating its fourth tour, The Landmark Revelation Society. Tupelo will be keeping a video journal of girlchild‘s book tour for the short documentary Hardbound: A Novel’s Life on the Road.

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