{"id":33051,"date":"2025-08-30T14:58:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T14:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/33051\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T14:58:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T14:58:08","slug":"young-mothers-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/33051\/","title":{"rendered":"Young mothers \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Girls Who Grew Big<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Author:<\/strong> Leila Mottley <\/p>\n

ISBN-13:<\/strong> 978-0-241-70551-3<\/p>\n

Publisher:<\/strong> Fig Tree <\/p>\n

Guideline Price:<\/strong> \u00a316.99 <\/p>\n

Author Leila Mottley conveys overlooked, destitute worlds populated by characters her own age. Her gripping first novel, Nightcrawling, written when she was 17, was about a teenage prostitute and made her the youngest Booker nominee. Her second, The Girls Who Grew Big, is narrated by three young women in a Florida backwater. Simone, who at 21 is the oldest, has twins and is the founder of the \u201cGirls\u201d, a community of local adolescent mothers. High school brainiac Emory, the only white girl, has an infant. Her pregnant classmate Adele is a champion swimmer. <\/p>\n

Nightcrawling was set in Mottley\u2019s home city of Oakland, which gave it specificity and grit. This story unfolds in the fictional town of Padua Beach and although its problems are starkly real, there is a fairytale feeling about this place, beset by hurricanes, alligators and villains like Emory\u2019s racist grandfather Pawpaw. Then there\u2019s the ever-present ocean, \u201ca magnificent green blurring of nothing\u201d, a symbol of the human condition and the girls themselves. \u201cAn ever-changing thing. Beautiful, then repulsive.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Nightcrawling review: promise, but no fireworksOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Mottley is also a poet, evident in her lavish language. A wave is \u201ca perfect curl, a turquoise that looked like dyed bathwater\u201d. Umbilical cords attached to the \u201cpulsing purple heart\u201d of a placenta, have texture like \u201cpasta before it\u2019s cooked through\u201d. When her lyricism is balanced with concrete details, Mottley excels. <\/p>\n

The most compelling sequence is when Simone finds herself pregnant again. The logistics of navigating Florida\u2019s abortion regulations \u2013 selling Emory\u2019s breast milk to raise money, travelling twice to a Tallahassee clinic \u2013 give her desperation weight. <\/p>\n

However, it\u2019s disconcerting to have Simone, Adele and Emory narrate with the same, arresting voice. Furthermore, the book is a touch oversteeped in wisdom, symbolism and, above all, love. In earnestly exhorting us to adulate these women, the book \u2013 while not saccharine \u2013 can seem cloyingly sweet despite its darkness. Plus, motherhood, so celebrated here, is undermined by how one-dimensionally awful the girls\u2019 own mothers are. Who abandons children in a hurricane?<\/p>\n

When there\u2019s humour, it\u2019s welcome, such as Emory\u2019s flinty observations about a teacher, \u201cone of those women whose favourite day of the month was when all her magazine subscriptions came in\u201d. Ultimately, the girls of \u201cGirls\u201d are most heroic when they are less than goddesses. Although the burdens they bear are mighty, they are still just teenagers, and it is when we are reminded of this that they are truly poignant. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Girls Who Grew Big Author: Leila Mottley ISBN-13: 978-0-241-70551-3 Publisher: Fig Tree Guideline Price: \u00a316.99 Author Leila…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[4957,359,18,117,22,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-33051","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-action","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-football","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}