Synopses & Reviews
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Rory Hendrix, the least likely of Girl Scouts, hasn't got a troop or a badge to call her own. But she still borrows the Handbook from the elementary school library to pore over its advice, looking for tips to get off the Calle — 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 she is one of the “third-generation bastards surely on the road to whoredom,” and she's determined to break the cycle. As Rory struggles with her mother's habit of trusting the wrong men, and the mixed blessing of being too smart for her own good, she finds refuge in books and language. From diary entries, social workers reports, story problems, arrest records, family lore, and her grandmother's letters, Rory crafts a devastating collage that shows us her world while she searches for the way out of it.
Review
“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, The New York Times
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.” The Boston Globe
Review
“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
Review
“Moments of strange beauty enhance our sense of the Calle community….[Hassman] makes Rory's milieu feel universal.” Megan Mayhew Bergman, The New York Times Book Review
Review
“Powerful…Rory transcends her bleak situation through dark humor and unaccountable smarts.” San Francisco Chronicle
Review
“This amazing debut spills over with love, but is still absolutely unflinching and real.” Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Review
"It's Rory's voice, as well as the offbeat ways in which she presents her coming-of-age story that make Girlchild so memorable....Rory is like a miniature Margaret Mead, observing and chronicling the life of the trailer park with an insider's knowledge and an anthropologist's detachment....It's a testament to Hassman's assurance as a writer that, even though we readers have the option of leaving, we hunker down in that trailer park with Rory for the long dry season of her youth." Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
Review
"In Girlchild, Hassman's spunky, shy and almost accidentally intelligent heroine, Rory Dawn Hendrix, is living in a trailer park outside Reno, 'south of nowhere.' Her mother, Jo, is a truck-stop bartender prone to trusting the wrong men....The book's portraiture is vivid and hauntingly unfamiliar; Hassman's personal history matters less than the artistic care she takes here — and she takes a great deal of care." The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Review
"Rory Hendrix will soon be a character readers around the country will know. She's the young heroine of Tupelo Hassman's debut Girlchild, a novel that drops us into her home in a Reno trailer park and invites us to be the only other member of her Girl Scout troop. With humor, warmth, and unflinching prose, Girlchild is a youth survival story of the very first rate." Publishers Weekly, pick of the week
Review
"This is a gorgeous first novel, as humorous as it is heartbreaking. Some will see similarities between Hassman and National Book Award recipient Jaimy Gordon (Lord of Misrule), and fans of coming-of-age novels will fall in love with Rory's story." Mara Dabrishus, Library Journal (starred review)
Review
"Hassman's debut gives voice — and soul — to a world so often reduced to cliché." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"In this inventive, exciting debut, Hassman writes a 1980s Reno trailer park into a neon, breathing world....Hassman's creatively-titled, short, free-form chapters are helium-filled imagination fodder, and Hassman takes what could be trite or unbelievable in less-talented hands and makes it entirely the opposite." Booklist
About the Author
Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia's MFA program. Her writing has been published in the Portland Review Literary Journal, Paper Street Press, Tantalum, We Still Like, and Zyzzyva, and by 100 Word Story, Five Chapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours.