By: Leila Mottley
ISBN: 9780593801123
Publisher: Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf
Publication Date: 06/24/2025
Format: Hardcover
My Rating: TBR
From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.
Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs an abortion in the heart of the South; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.
The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.
Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.
Praise
"The Girls Who Grew Big is a novel about teen pregnancy that brilliantly upends every reductive trope and platitude on the subject. With impeccable and breathtaking prose, Mottley takes us into the treacherous terrain where girlhood and womanhood collide, and where families and friendships fracture, and the lines between them blur. Simone, Adela, Emory and The Girls live out loud and are flawed, tender, and absolutely unforgettable. Mottley continues to show us the power and beauty of her pen!”
—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
“This broken world is lucky to have Leila Mottley writing in it. Like Jesmyn Ward, Kiese Laymon and Toni Cade Bambara before her, Mottley digs deep into the parts of America that many tell us to forget. In gorgeous prose, she brings to life the beauty and brutality of the Florida panhandle, and turns narratives about motherhood, girlhood and the South on their heads. Mottley is the real deal—a vital voice in the American literary tapestry, giving us a full, empathetic understanding of the parts of life the rest of culture tells us to ignore.”
—Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie
“Raw, wild, and achingly beautiful, The Girls Who Grew Big is one of the most spiritually accurate and electric portrayals of motherhood I’ve ever read. Leila Mottley is the real deal.”
—Rufi Thorpe, author of Margo’s Got Money Troubles
About the Author
Leila Mottley is the author of the novel Nightcrawling, an Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times best seller. She was also the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live.
Her debut poetry collection woke up no light will be published on April 16, 2024.
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For all other inquiries, contact Lucy Carson at lcarson@friedrichagency.com
