Author Leila Mottley conveys overlooked, destitute worlds populated by characters her own age. Her gripping first novel, Nightcrawling, written when she was 17, was about a teenage prostitute and made her the youngest Booker nominee. Her second, The Girls Who Grew Big, is narrated by three young women in a Florida backwater. Simone, who at 21 is the oldest, has twins and is the founder of the “Girls”, a community of local adolescent mothers. High school brainiac Emory, the only white girl, has an infant. Her pregnant classmate Adele is a champion swimmer.
Nightcrawling was set in Mottley’s home city of Oakland, which gave it specificity and grit. This story unfolds in the fictional town of Padua Beach and although its problems are starkly real, there is a fairytale feeling about this place, beset by hurricanes, alligators and villains like Emory’s racist grandfather Pawpaw. Then there’s the ever-present ocean, “a magnificent green blurring of nothing”, a symbol of the human condition and the girls themselves. “An ever-changing thing. Beautiful, then repulsive.”
[ Nightcrawling review: promise, but no fireworksOpens in new window ]
Mottley is also a poet, evident in her lavish language. A wave is “a perfect curl, a turquoise that looked like dyed bathwater”. Umbilical cords attached to the “pulsing purple heart” of a placenta, have texture like “pasta before it’s cooked through”. When her lyricism is balanced with concrete details, Mottley excels.
The most compelling sequence is when Simone finds herself pregnant again. The logistics of navigating Florida’s abortion regulations – selling Emory’s breast milk to raise money, travelling twice to a Tallahassee clinic – give her desperation weight.
However, it’s disconcerting to have Simone, Adele and Emory narrate with the same, arresting voice. Furthermore, the book is a touch oversteeped in wisdom, symbolism and, above all, love. In earnestly exhorting us to adulate these women, the book – while not saccharine – can seem cloyingly sweet despite its darkness. Plus, motherhood, so celebrated here, is undermined by how one-dimensionally awful the girls’ own mothers are. Who abandons children in a hurricane?
When there’s humour, it’s welcome, such as Emory’s flinty observations about a teacher, “one of those women whose favourite day of the month was when all her magazine subscriptions came in”. Ultimately, the girls of “Girls” are most heroic when they are less than goddesses. Although the burdens they bear are mighty, they are still just teenagers, and it is when we are reminded of this that they are truly poignant.