SWEETGIRL
|
advance praise"Travis Mulhauser’s Sweetgirl is a compulsively readable novel – no doubt about it - finish the first chapter and you will be hooked, I guarantee. This book is violent, dark, and impressively redemptive. Villains are haunted by their innocent victims and somehow discover grace. Heroes are flawed, fallible and reek of whiskey and regret. And perhaps at the center of Mulhauser’s novel is an unlikely character
whom never speaks a word, never takes a step, but propels the entire story along like a runaway eighteen-wheeler. Sweetgirl is a upper-Midwestern homage to great American quest novels like True Grit and Winter’s Bone. It is a truly memorable and remarkable read." Nickolas Butler Internationally bestselling author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Beneath the Bonfire. "Travis Mulhauser's Sweetgirl is a riveting novel about how a bunch of drug addicts and drug dealers and boozers and quasi-orphans and quasi-parents deal with the prospect of a missing baby girl during a massive snowstorm in northern Michigan. This sounds grim, and it can be grim, but this book is also far, far funnier than it has any right to be. If you're a fan of Charles Portis and Denis Johnson--and if you're not, then you should be--then this book is exactly what you've been wanting, what you've been waiting for."
Brock Clarke Author of The Happiest People in the 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 felt thrilled and shocked, and I couldn't stop turning the pages. Travis Mulhauser is a writer to be reckoned with.”
Lindsay Hunter Author of Ugly Girls and Don't Kiss Me "In its dark and deadpan hilarity, Sweetgirl reminded me of other great chroniclers of the criminal element found in our upper Midwest—Tom Drury, Jim Harrison, the Coen Brothers in Fargo. But Mullhauser’s Cutler County, a place of numbered days and last chances, is a part of that country we’ve not seen before. Nor have we heard it described in a voice like Percy James’, filled with true wit, cunning, and the unwanted wisdom of a child denied a childhood. This novel comes on like the blizzard at its center, 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 "To try to nail down what Mulhauser is doing in Sweetgirl—to say it’s a comedy or a tragedy—is to do the book a grave disservice. It’s far too large of heart and full of ambition to call it any one thing. Like its young narrator,Sweetgirl seeks first and foremost—and, finally, only—the truth. It is a beautiful, harrowing, startling achievement. And it’s one hell of a great story."
Drew Perry Author of Kids These Days "Sweetgirl is a gritty, compelling novel of a world where even a sixteen-year-old must confront what Edith Wharton called 'the hard considerations of the poor.' Mullhauser depicts his people and their landscape with uncompromising fidelity."
Ron Rash Author of Serena and Above the Waterfall |
