Girlchild (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Debut novelist Tupelo Hassman will read and sign her novel Girlchild, which has already garnered rave reviews!

"This amazing debut spills over with love, but is still absolutely unflinching and real. That is no easy combo to pull off, and Tupelo Hassman does it repeatedly with precision and grace. Rory D. is ebulliently alive on the page; she’s really that kind of fresh new voice people talk about, leaving us with a completely memorable character." --Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

"I’m smitten by Tupelo Hassman’s debut. The beauty of this story is how it plays: great turns in language, humor that points to sadness, and a structure that is messy and tidy all at the same time. Girlchild is overwhelming in an engaging and beautiful way.” —Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper

"If I were back on the staff of my high school yearbook I would vote Tupelo Hassman and her book Most Likely to Go Viral on Goodreads and Most Likely to Succeed in the Eyes of Critics." --Nicole Lamy, Boston Globe

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 to Heliography, 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.

Girlchild (Hardcover)

By Tupelo Hassman

$24.00

ISBN-13: 9780374162573
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1/2012

Other Editions of this Title

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.

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