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Also by Tupelo Hassman:

Girlchild, February 2012
Hardcover / e-Book

GIRLCHILD
By: Tupelo Hassman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
February 2012
On Sale: February 14, 2012
290 pages
ISBN: 0374162573
EAN: 9780374162573
Kindle: B005J4DV9O
Hardcover / e-Book
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Young Adult | Fiction Family Life

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.

Media Buzz

Fresh Air - NPR - December 14, 2012