Girlchild.
Working 12 hour days is not conducive to reading or blogging. I can tell you I read this book, and I liked it so much that I managed to read it in less than a week, even with my work schedule. But I kept putting this off until now and, of course, most of what I was going to write has been forgotten.
But I'll say this: I like Hassman's style. I like her metaphors and similes. I'm a sucker for a good simile.
Synopsis/spoilers: Rory lives with her alcoholic mom in a trailer park, is molested by a neighbor and bullied by his daughter, goes a little nutso afterwards but recovers, loses her mom to an accident and her grandmother to old age/possibly cancer, and towards the end of the book everything gets a little weird and dream-like. If I had to dislike anything, it would be the last part, post-death of her mom. It ends with her setting fire to her trailer and skipping town, and she believes she's starting over and it's going to be better, and Hassman makes it clear that Rory sees this as a rebirth. I don't know if how I felt about the ending is me injecting my own reasoning into the story or if Hassman meant for us to see deeper into the situation and see a little more of the truth, but here's what I got from it: at the end Rory was unstable. She saw herself as escaping, but to me it looked like she was digging herself deeper into a life of poverty and craziness, and running off completely alone at the age of 16 just increased her chances of being a victim again.
