3 Stars - Recommended to fans of edgy, straight up trailer trash fiction
Audio: 8.3 hours
Publisher: FSG
Narrator: Kathleen Early
Released: November 2014
Typical teenage girls getting into typical teenage girl stuff, only so much worse. In Ugly Girls, the writing was always on the wall of what ultimately boils down to the story of two incredibly incompatible BFF's who test one another, pushing each another from bad decision to bad decision, eschewing the consequences in lieu of the thrill of the moment, until that one final moment. The moment neither can take back though they wish like hell they could.
Though you don't want to, you'll find the edgy, hard-core trashiness of the girls intoxicating. Baby Girl has made herself physically ugly, shaving her head, outlining her lips in a grotesque clown's mouth, donning her brother's old clothes, while Perry's ugliness is more behavioral, emotional, using her physical loveliness as a weapon.
Home's nothing to get all worked up over. Both live boring, dead-end lives. Baby Girl lives with her uncle and struggles with the fact that her once handsome and devilish older brother has been reduced to a drooling, temper-tantrum-throwing five-year-old as the result of a tragic bike accident. Perry, she lives with her drunk-as-a-skunk mother, who never seems to care where she is or what she's up to and her step-father, a saint of a man for being able to put up with the two of 'em.
Oh god, how this book brought the memories of my teenage years rushing back to me. For all intents and purposes, I was a fairly "good girl". I'd sneak around with the boys in the middle of the night, sure, slipping out the bedroom window like Perry did, my father never the wiser. I skipped school and chilled at friends' houses listening to music and watching them get high. A group of us would hang out in the local trailer park - skin heads and hippies talking about the ways they were gonna change the world, gawking at the strung out pregnant girls shoving ice cream and pickles into their junkie mouths. Making nuisances of ourselves at the local coffee shop, batting our under-aged eyelashes at the cute college boys who worked here. Cruising the main streets by the beach with the windows down, radio blasting, the wind in our ears, like nothing could touch us, just passing the time till something better came along.
Unlike us though, to get even with the world for the bum deck they were dealt, Perry and Baby Girl get off on having fun at other peoples expense, joyriding in the middle of the night, stealing cars, skipping school and cutting classes. They even end up in the dunk-tank overnight for attempting to steal stuff from the local pharmacy. But all that becomes child's play when the two of them discover that they're both being chatted up by the same guy - a guy who has a serious crush on Perry. When the girls finally agree to meet up and show him what's what, that's where the real trouble starts brewing. And once they start that ball rolling, there's no stopping its momentum.
From slow start to awkward and abrupt ending, Lindsay's multi-charactered novel is all about the ugly. The ugliness inside of us, how feeling ugly makes you act ugly, like there's no other way to be. Ugly Girls is a hopeless, grimy, gritty sort of novel that leaves you feeling as unwashed and skanky as its characters do and makes you thankful that you aren't raising teenage girls. Though now I feel I have to go and warn my teenage son about girls like them.
Sounds like an interesting review - I have to check it out!
ReplyDeleteOkay, call me a big dumb ass, but I forgot this is a novel, which is was I wanted to read it. I read her story collection and felt like I wanted so much more from the characters. Not that Hunter wrote shallow stories, but that the characters were so interesting that I wanted them to be real.
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