Girlchild (Hassman)

Book Reviews
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 - New York Times
 

Moments of strange beauty enhance our sense of the Calle community….[Hassman] makes Rory’s milieu feel universal.
Megan Mayhew Bergman - New York Times Book Review


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.
Boston Globe


Powerful.... Rory transcends her bleak situation through dark humor and unaccountable smarts.
San Francisco Chronicle

 
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
 

Blighted opportunity and bad choices revisit three generations of women in a Reno, Nev., trailer park in these affecting dispatches by debut novelist Hassman. Narrator Rory Dawn Hendrix, “R.D.,” is growing up in the late ’60s on the dusty calle, where families scrape.... Poring over a secondhand copy of The Girl Scout Handbook, with its how-to emphasis on honor and duty, comforts R.D.... Hassman’s characters are hounded by a relentless, recurring poverty and ignorance, and by shame, so that the sins of the mothers keep repeating, and suicide is often the only way out. Despite a few jarring moments of moralizing, this debut possesses powerful writing and unflinching clarity.
Publishers Weekly


Bright young girl must endure family dysfunction and sexual abuse while coming of age in a Reno trailer park during the late 1980s.... Taking inspiration from a battered library copy of The Girl Scout Handbook, Rory does a remarkable job raising herself, while trying to let go of the people (and hurts) that no longer serve her. With a compelling (if harrowing) story and a wise-child narrator, Hassman's debut gives voice—and soul—to a world so often reduced to cliche. A darkly funny and frequently heartbreaking portrait of life as one of America's have-nots.
Kirkus Reviews