Sweetgirl
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- ¥680
発行者による作品情報
A tense cat-and-mouse game and a brilliantly realised story of hope in a seemingly hopeless place
A LIFE IS IN HER HANDS
The last thing Percy expected to find in the local drug den was a baby girl. Now she needs to get the baby to a hospital, and fast. But there’s a blizzard outside and soon two-bit criminal Shelton Potter has woken up and is on the hunt for whoever has taken the baby . . .
‘Read-in-a-day, stay-up-all-night compelling’ Stylist
‘The Catcher in the Rye meets Fargo’ Digital Fix
‘Hilarious, heartbreaking and true’ NPR
Reviews
‘So, so compelling. Read-in-a-day, stay-up-all-night compelling’ Stylist
‘Darkly humorous . . . this book must be read’ Literary Review
‘Blackly comic . . . featuring echoes of True Grit’s Mattie Ross and Winter’s Bone’s Ree Dolly, Percy is a fearless, funny and stubborn leading lady’ Shortlist
‘Compulsively readable . . . finish the first chapter and you will be hooked’ Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Beneath the Bonfire
‘If you’re a fan of Charles Portis and Denis Johnson this book is exactly what you’ve been waiting for’ Brock Clarke, author of The Happiest People in the World
‘Gritty, compelling . . . Mulhauser depicts his people and their landscape with uncompromising fidelity’ Ron Rash, author of Above the Waterfall
‘This novel comes on like the blizzard at its centre, and leaves you dazzled and dazed not only by how much Travis Mulhauser knows, but how deeply he cares’ Michael Parker, author of All I Have in This World
‘There's a big old neon heart pulsing on every page of Sweetgirl, like the sign to a bar you can't help but enter. I couldn't stop turning the pages’ Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls and Don’t Kiss Me
About the author
Travis Mulhauser is from Petoskey, Michigan. He lives currently in Durham, North Carolina with his wife and two children and earned his MFA from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When plucky 16-year-old Percy James discovers that her feckless mother, Carletta, is missing from their shabby home in a decaying town at the northwest tip of Michigan's lower peninsula, she jumps in her pickup truck and sets off during a blizzard to look for Carletta at the drug den of Shelton Potter, a maker and dealer of methamphetamine. Carletta is not there, and Shelton and his girlfriend are conked out, but Percy finds a baby girl crying in a freezing-cold bedroom and impulsively grabs her, determined to get the baby to a hospital. Percy enlists the help of her mother's ex-boyfriend, Portis Dale, a gentlemanly alcoholic who greets her by saying, fondly, "Well, shit the bed." This event-filled debut novel then alternates between Percy's desperate attempts to elude a vengeful Shelton, and Shelton's own slow-witted ruminations as he mumbles around the snow-filled woods with his trusty Glock pistol. By the time Carletta shows up and the baby is succored, four men have died: by incineration, by a gun mistakenly fired, by suicide, and by running a snowmobile into a tree. To his credit, Mulhauser evocatively describes the bleak landscape and starkly degraded social mores of an isolated community after the tourists have departed. The novel's credibility suffers, however, from the far too clever and unlikely dialogue spoken by unsavory characters as they consume a prodigious amount of whiskey. A virtually illiterate "scumbag" mutters, "It's an academic point"; another character, who has never left the remote backwoods, refuses to become "one of those pieces of human installation art." Yet the novel succeeds as a coming-of-age story when Percy, having survived grisly violence and abysmal loss, experiences a realization about how to shape her future.
