Girlchild, A Book Club Dud

My book club met on Tuesday to discuss our June book, Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman. Based on the book's description on Amazon (see below), we were all expecting something light, funny, and endearing, i.e. the perfect summer read. 

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. 

Well, our expectations couldn't have been more wrong. What the description should have said is something closer to the following:  This is the story of a little girl (Rory) who doesn't fit in anywhere, particularly because she is harboring secrets of long-suffered abuse (both sexual and psychological) by her babysitter and her babysitter's father, and she is too scared to tell anyone. She has one friend who suddenly moves away before they can really develop their friendship, and her friend later dies an early death. Rory receives little support from her own family and is ultimately left to fend for herself before she is even old enough to vote, much less drive a car. Rory is wildly smart, but she squanders her opportunities so as not to burden her mother with having to miss work to take her to the state spelling bee championship, and based on the book's ending, it doesn't sound like she will ever make it to college. She may get out of her trailer park, but you have to wonder, whether she will just end up some place similar.  

I did like Hassman's writing style. The mix of letters, social worker reports, diary entries, etc. was interesting, but the subject matter was just too bleak without any redemption or even prospect of redemption for the main character. Ultimately, this was one of the most depressing books any of us had ever read, and it elicited the least amount of discussion of any book since we first formed our club in September 2011.