Lead Review (The Girls Who Grew Big)
- Book: The Girls Who Grew Big
- Location: Florida Panhandle
- Author: Leila Mottley
The story focusses on three teenage women, who have unexpectedly become pregnant. They congregate in fictional Padua Beach, in the Florida Panhandle. They hang out together and as their stories unfold there is detail of the family rejection, cruelty and mismanagement that each has endured.
“…Padua Beach is full of all kinds of people. I could walk two minutes and be on a street full of African Americans, another minute and I’d be standing in a Filipino’s driveway..”
Theirs is a basic lifestyle, as they each adjust to pregnancy and their new status of parenthood, living out of a red truck. Their futures now look very different as they face the world through grown-up eyes, caring for their children. There is a terrific resilience and sisterhood but there is also pitiful destitution. And despite their circumstances they try to be the best they can, for each other, for their children in a dog-eat-dog world.
This is a story that rolls through the emotions, that offers fairly graphic scenes of childbirth and a rawness that is heart rending. It is a powerful story that is penned with a surprising maturity, given the author is in her mid twenties.
A very different and quite extraordinary novel.
Please wait...
