Girlchild

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good book submitted by manz on June 25, 2013, 8:26am I ended up reading Girlchild because it won an Alex Award this year. The Alex is given to books written for adults with high appeal to teens. I don't know how well this book will do with teens... It's kind of a reach. But there is a child as the main character, so I suppose that's why.

The book is a bit hard to read due to the gritty nature of the story and of the emotional and physical abuse that happens to young Rory Dawn as she grows up with her mother and grandmother in the 70s and 80s in a barely-there trailer park town the residents call Calle. The story is told by Rory over various points in her life, up to the age of 16, and is interspersed with documents from social workers and letters from her grandma. The book delves into the rocky relationship between a mother, her daugher, and her own daughter. The women who generation after generation raise children alone and live paycheck to paycheck. Rory Dawn has such a strong voice, I couldn't help but root for her as she clung to her Girl Scouts Handbook, which was the bible of her life and she looked to it to solve most problems.

While the nature of the book is a bit dark, I still found myself unable to put the book down once I got deep into it. The language is poetic yet not annoying. While I read I hoped and pondered the life of this girl and wondered if she would ever be able to crawl out of the dirt of Calle.

Very Dark submitted by valerieclaires on August 26, 2014, 10:21am It's rare that I don't finish a book, even just for the sake of being able to say I finished it. However, I just couldn't get through this one. Girlchild is very well written, it's the subject matter that made it difficult. Rory Dawn's life is dark, punctuated by a troubled mother, a dusty trailer park, and abusive community members. The raw and open way the book is written is what makes it so difficult to read - you really feel for Rory and feel like Rory as she tries to brush off the dirt life throws at her.