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Summary
Summary
Gritty and realistic, "A Girl, In Parts" is never sentimental about either poverty or childhood as it follows a young girl with limitless dreams and confidence in an uncertain world. First novelist Jasmine Paul has crafted an elegant coming-of-age story in 97 perfectly told vignettes.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This quiet gem of a debut novel projects sincerity through its tightly focused vignettes and unsentimental depiction of a challenging though in many ways ordinary five years in the life of one girl. In 97 short sections, Paul captures the convincing voice of Dorothy, at the start of the novel a nine-year-old growing up in the 1980s in Martinsburg, W.Va. Dorothy lives with her bartending mother; her stepfather, Lyle; and her baby brother, Gabe, in a tumbledown house in a town she despises; she wishes it would burn to the ground so she could go live in Cleveland with her father. The family contends with working-class poverty and illness (Dorothy has chronic asthma and survives a bout with tuberculosis; her brother contracts ringworm and is slow to walk and talk). When life takes a turn for the better they move to eastern Washington State Dorothy is subjected to the humiliating experience of having to wear braces and headgear to correct a jaw deformity. But these harsh details, delivered unsparingly and without self-pity from Dorothy's point of view, are merely the backdrop for the timeworn adolescent rites of passage of friendships, crushes and the search for identity. While she gains acceptance by excelling on the basketball team with a group of Indian girls and becomes close friends with the beautiful and rebellious Dawn, Dorothy must also face the realities of the tensions within her family. Paul's sure grasp of her narrator's voice and keen observations make both the ordinary and unusual aspects of one childhood shine. Regional author tour. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A winning debut in which growing up happens fast-and all out of order-for one young girl. It starts in West Virginia when Dorothy (Dottie) is just nine. She loves her developmentally stunted younger brother, Gabe, but everything else is pretty much a wash. All the worse, her mother is making them move with her boyfriend, the eternally drunken and good-for-nothing Lyle, to a tiny town in Washington. After the move, things are more or less the same, except that Dottie starts getting older and, ever so subtly noted by newcomer Paul, figuring out her place in the world. Dottie spends a lot of time obsessing over her real father, who lives back in Cleveland, and over Lyle's complete lack of usefulness, but it's in the parsing of the everyday traumas and epiphanies of childhood that Paul's fiction starts to pop off the page. While the candles on Dottie's birthday cakes have barely gotten into the double digits, she is already carrying the weight of a full-grown adult on her tomboyish shoulders and acting appropriately. Fighting for a place on the football team, dreaming of being a virtuoso saxophonist, drinking Wild Turkey with her best friend, and shyly eyeing the high-school boy she's too terrified to speak to, Dottie is a welter of spark and promise who seems almost destined to burn out before the final page. Unavoidably, A Girl, in Parts pays lip service to several standard rites-of-passage moments but thankfully avoids the vast majority of the coming-of-age drama, managing to show there's just as many ways to write about becoming an adolescent as there are adolescents. One tough heroine and a clear-eyed author willing to go take her wherever she needs to go, honestly and without compromise.
Library Journal Review
In her first novel, Paul creates a child of nine who lives with her mother, stepfather, and small half-brother in rural West Virginia poverty. Dottie hates her life, but she prefers it to the unknown that awaits her in Washington State, where the family moves. However, she is pleasantly surprised by her new living conditions and social possibilities. As a gifted child, she intellectualizes the changes that adolescence brings and finds it difficult to cope socially and emotionally. She determines to overcome her physical shortcomings to win a spot on the girl's basketball team. In doing so, she wins the respect of the Native American girls on the team, who honor her with the nickname Utah. Although Dottie looks for trouble, she finds very little of it and begins to like her life. Just as things begin to click, her family plans to move again, but Dottie will no doubt do well. Paul captures the pain and confusion of adolescence, the struggles of poverty, the psychological impact of abuse, and the small rebellions that make "coming of age" a true passage to a new state. Her prose is realistic, her vignettes illustrative. Recommended. Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
