Girlchild

by Tupelo Hassman

It's about a girl who grows up poor in a trailer park. All the miserableness you'd expect to find. I liked the author's voice, the way she makes pictures with words in a new way really intrigued me. I liked the idea that the main character fixated on a girl scout handbook and yearned to integrate its moral code into her life- but it turned out that was such a small part of the story. I started dreading it was going to be a story about sexual abuse, and it was. I could not read more than one description about that- even though at first what was really going on was only hinted at, the character couldn't even bear to describe things herself. Some of the chapters are just pages full of blacked out lines with a word or two visible here- I have never seen that in a novel before and it baffled me. It's told in bits and pieces, diary entries, social worker's reports and the like- which I suppose could work but here didn't give me any connection at all.

Borrowed from the public library.

Abandoned      275 pages, 2012

more opinions:
Regular Rumination