Girlchild /

RORY DAWN HENDRIX'S maternal lineage is bad news. Her mother and grandmother are "biblically fertile" former teenage mothers, "high school dropouts, . . . welfare moms, alcoholics, gamblers, smokers, ragers." These three generations of Hendrix women are all, for a time, residents of the Calle de las Flores, a dust-choked Reno trailer park where violence and sexual abuse abound, and an unlocked door is an invitation of the worst kind. Though Rory seems heir to all the disadvantages in the world, her grandmother Shirley Rose makes her expectations clear: "Someone's got to make it and it has to be you." Tupelo Hassman's debut novel, "Girlchild," a bildungsroman set in the 1980s, charts Rory's poor-white American girlhood in innovative form, unfolding in mini-chapters, word problems, social workers' reports, newspaper clippings, letters, even a riff on a cocktail recipe. Hassman also subverts the how-to genre, invoking the middle-class directives of old Girl Scout Handbook mottos and chapter titles - "The Right Use of Your Body," "Finding Your Way When Lost" - which applied to Rory's world may be wholly ineffectual but also hint at the dark forces pushing and pulling at her life. Rory's preoccupation with the Girl Scout Handbook underscores the vulnerability of her youth. She repeatedly checks it out of the library because "nothing else makes promises like that around here, promises with these words burning inside them: honor, duty and try." Though a gifted speller and star student, Rory, still in elementary school, spends most of her energy navigating a deeply flawed adult world. She can "cuss" and "have birth control as soon as I ask," and plays with the jukebox at the Truck Stop, where her mother, Jo, tends bar. An overly attentive male patron gives Rory a "jailhouse bouquet," a clump of roses hand-fashioned out of toilet paper. But Rory senses danger in a man's attention. As she recalls her grandmother telling her: "I'd better keep my legs closed if I wanted to keep my future open." Hassman avoids falling into stock characterization - the deprived but talented protagonist who overcomes great odds to achieve success - by emphasizing the gut-wrenching details of Rory's childhood. Rory's success is never guaranteed. In fact, as the novel progresses, it seems heartbreakingly unlikely. While Jo works the night shift or wanders drunk from bar to bar, Rory is watched by Carol, a girl who's been abused by her father and is as "greedy and cruel as a casino pit boss." Carol's father, the "Hardware Man," sexually assaults Rory repeatedly in the bathroom of his shop. Many nights Rory squeezes "into the crack that is growing between the mattress and the wall" while the Hardware Man attacks Carol on the same bed. "Girlchild" makes explicit the steep toll of abuse. Rory figures that in "fairy tales there's only one Big Bad Wolf," and the "story ends in happily and ever after. But . . . every Calle girl knows that once the My-What-Big-Paws-You-Have fall on her skin, Little Red will carry that scent no matter how hard she scrubs." Hassman gives us chapters of blacked-out prose, a form of omission that suggests Rory has endured acts too heinous for words. Though the technique is heavy-handed, it effectively mirrors Rory's attempt at suppression; brief passages left uncensored ("I hate Rory D") reveal her painful self-loathing. She is so traumatized that she develops scabs around her lips from pathologically covering her mouth, as she attempts to stifle mention of the abuse for fear of retribution. "I hold one hand over my mouth and swing with the other hand," Rory says. "I rise away." Although the novel is harrowing, Hassman's imaginative prose helps the reading go easier. Trailer park epigrams ("Jim Beam didn't fill up my dance card") and moments of strange beauty enhance our sense of the Calle community. Hassman describes "Calle girls" who "cry uncle through clenched teeth" while "sirens flash redneck blues across the whitestucco, nicotine-yellow ceiling." Hassman's nods to '80s ephemera ("Family Ties," school folders that shriek "I Love Ricky Schroder Forever!") also make Rory's milieu feel universal. Hassman renders Rory's losses acutely: her innocence, her virginity, her chance to escape the Calle, her connections to the people she loves. Occasional digressions into high-minded moral questions and certain narrative innovations, like a series of word problems, pull us away at critical moments - particularly at the end, when we're most concerned with Rory's decision-making and "sorrowful circumstances." But the puzzles do highlight one of the novel's strengths: Hassman's determination to quantify Rory's abuse. One problem, titled "Hypotenoose," asks readers to use the Pythagorean theorem to answer a question about a man's shadow at midday. Others involve drunken drivers and rates of speed, or summon the memory of Rory's grandfather: "How many of his original four daughters have been deafened by gunshot? (Show all of your work.)" These quizzes emulate the feeling of being constantly tested as a child. They measure the horrors of abuse and represent a survivor's constant refiguring of pain and loss, and of Rory's unsolvable problems. Late in the novel Rory considers what may grow from her grandmother's gardening experiments and calculates the value of her mother's 1972 Nobility double-wide trailer. Rory is metaphorical salvage herself, a thing of value roughed up, beautiful but brutalized. And though "Girlchild" is not a novel of easy triumph or opportunity seized, one imagines, even hopes, that Rory is capable of fulfilling her grandmother's wish, despite the way both nature and nurture have failed her. Megan Mayhew Bergman's first story collection, "Birds of a Lesser Paradise," will be published next month.

In this inventive, exciting debut, Hassman writes a 1980s Reno trailer park into a neon, breathing world. Reno is just like Tahoe, only without anything beautiful. Narrator Rory Dawn, whose mother, simultaneously tripping on acid and giving birth, gave her a name that sounds like a screaming sunrise and calls her girlchild for short, is a grade-schooler when we meet her. Like the 1972 Nobility double-wide she lives in, trailer-park anthropologist Rory's own foundation is lacking, at best. She inventories her mother's alcoholism and mental illness with heartbreaking, childish normalcy. The abuse she suffers at the hands of her inept babysitters turns her into an introverted bookworm who wins spelling bees (until she worries her smarts will alienate her beloved mother) and finds solace in the library. Rory's name fills the circulation card of her school's Girl Scout Handbook, and she earns proficiency badges as a troop of one. 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.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist

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 by on low-paying jobs and government assistance, everything is broken down, violence barely suppressed, babysitting shared, and "uncle" is more often than not a euphemism for child molester. "Smokey, Barney, Johnny Law, Pig, uncles with their badges, with their belt buckles, say, 'Hey Sugar, Toots, Sweet Thing, is your mama home?' hand already through the already ripped screen door, finger on the latch." Teenage pregnancies dogged both R.D.'s capricious mother, Jo, a waitress with four grown sons, and grandmother Shirley Rose, an inveterate gambler employed at the keno ticket counter who couldn't keep R.D.'s grandfather from sexually abusing R.D. and her sisters, and told R.D. to "keep her legs closed if she wanted to keep her future open." As bad as it is, there's some hope that this girl, with her early aptitude at spelling, will escape the stigma of being "feebleminded." Poring over a secondhand copy of The Girl Scout Handbook, with its how-to emphasis on honor and duty, comforts R.D., especially when babysat by Carol, a brutalized neighbor girl, who leaves R.D. alone with her predatory father, "the Hardware Man." 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. Agent: Bill Clegg, WME Entertainment. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Hassman's debut is a brutally realistic portrait of trailer park America. Growing up with her bartender single mother and Grandma in Calle de los Flores, outside of Reno, NV, Rory Dawn Hendrix scours her copy of the Girl Scout Handbook-checked out many times from the school library-in efforts to break out of the mold of poverty and sexual abuse that has been fashioned for her. By sharing her opinions of Handbook entries, found letters and social worker reports, family memories and haunting, half-remembered atrocities, Rory puts together a scrapbook of the Calle that also records her escape. Verdict 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, Ursuline Coll. Lib., Pepper Pike, OH (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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