The Year of Needy Girls

by Patricia Smith

Overview

A Lambda Award finalist that "recalls both Hellman's The Children's Hour and Lehane's Mystic River in a story about murder and false accusations" (The Bay Area Reporter).
 
Bradley, Massachusetts, is in many ways a typical small New England town, but a river divides it in half—on one side, the East End: crowded triple-deckers, the Most Precious Blood parish, and a Brazilian immigrant community; and on the other, the West End: renovated Victorians, Brandywine Academy, and families with last names as venerable as the Mayflower.
 
Deirdre Murphy and her partner Sara Jane (SJ) Edmonds have just moved to their first house—and for the first time are open in their relationship—in the West End, where Deirdre teaches at Brandywine Academy. A dedicated teacher from a working-class background, she is well loved by her students. But the murder of ten-year-old Leo Rivera from the East End changes everything—for Deirdre and SJ, for the girls at Brandywine, and for all of Bradley. And when Deirdre is falsely accused of sexually molesting one of her students, the entire town erupts.
 
"From a landscape peopled with supportive neighbors, coworkers and lovers of all types, Smith erases the certainty underlying characters' beliefs and sets them tumbling into chaos. The Year of Needy Girls is an intelligent and captivating read that will spur readers to question their own truths."—VA Living Magazine
 
"Smith conveys the impact of this prejudicial hostility on two young women who are struggling to make their way in an intolerant world with a tender and delicate understanding in this nuanced tale of identity and misperception, connection and alienation."—Booklist
 
"A provoking read."—Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617755194
Publisher:	Kaylie Jones Books
Publication date:	01/03/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Patricia A. Smith's nonfiction has appeared in several anthologies including One Teacher in Ten: Gay and Lesbian Educators Tell Their Stories and One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium: LGBT Educators Speak Out About What's Gotten Better . . . and What Hasn't. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Salon, Broad Street, Prime Number, and Gris-Gris. The Year of Needy Girls is her first novel. A native New Englander, Smith now lives in Chester, Virginia, with her partner.

Read an Excerpt

The Year of Needy Girls

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By Patricia A. Smith

Akashic Books

Copyright © 2017 Patricia A. Smith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61775-487-6

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PROLOGUE

AUGUST

The air, electric, buzzes and hums. It's the end of August. One of those humid, still Saturdays, the city empty, or holding its breath.

East of the river, near the abandoned textile mill and the old shoe warehouse, Leo Rivera rides his bicycle, a ten-speed hand-me-down from his brothers. He pays no mind to the heat. Leo stands and pumps past a vacant lot, one of several in his neighborhood, littered with broken glass that sparkles in the sun. Tufts of stiff, burnt grass poke though cracks in the concrete, and red plastic milk crates sit overturned and empty in the lot, waiting for the men who will gather there later to drink beer and listen to the game. Through the opened window of a shingled brown triple-decker, he hears Portuguese, the same radio station his mother listens to, the same one that will broadcast the soccer match this afternoon, Brazil versus Chile.

Leo likes soccer but unlike his brothers, he prefers baseball. Best of all, he likes riding his bike. He pedals hard past the chain-link fence of his school, Most Precious Blood Elementary — MPB they all call it — and the hot tarred blacktop where he will be having recess again in a few short days. He whizzes past Most Precious Blood Church and the white sign that advertises Wednesday-night Bingo in the parish hall next door. His grandmother is a regular. She wins, but not big, not enough to buy him a new bike, which he wants more than anything, which he covets. He doesn't covet anyone else's bike, just a Trek he has seen advertised in a magazine, but he knows that wanting things and praying for them is bad. Greed, the MPB Sisters say, is a sin. Not a mortal one, like killing, but a venial one, a misdemeanor. Leo tries to avoid wanting the bike outright because he doesn't like to disappoint the Sisters at MPB, but worst of all, he doesn't like disappointing his mother.

His mother tells him that he is her pride and joy. The One Born in America. Does he know how lucky he is to be living in a country where his father can get decent work and he and his brothers can go to good schools? He must thank God for America, his mother tells him. Every night. He must pray and thank God for sending them all to this good country.

The American boy doesn't know any other country. He hears the stories and he thinks he is the luckiest of all not to know anything but America, this city, this neighborhood where he goes to school and plays baseball, this land of shiny bicycles. At night, when he is saying his prayers, always thanking God for America, Leo slips and tries to make deals about how he will help his mother and how he will do all his homework if he can only get that Trek for his birthday. His birthday isn't for weeks, but he is thinking about it now, riding past the library, past the empty Little League field with the backstop halfway torn down, past the mechanic shop where Mickey, his next-door neighbor, works part-time. Mickey is almost a friend. He's much older, but he helps Leo with his bike, lubes the chain for him or replaces it outright like he did at the beginning of summer. Leo is thinking of his birthday and how much he would like that Trek to ride to school and show his friends. He won't even mind the helmet his mother makes him wear. He won't complain ever about the helmet, he promises God.

So when Leo coasts down the sidewalk toward his grandmother's house, a white triple-decker surrounded by a chain-link fence, and Mickey is waiting, sitting in the passenger seat of a car alongside the curb, engine still running, Leo is only thinking of his Trek, seeing himself on the first day of school, riding to MPB on the shiny bike. He isn't thinking how strange it is that Mickey is here waiting for him. No, he is thinking only of his birthday and the way it will be when his mother leads him to the dining room.

Mickey calls, "Leo!" out the car window and tells him to hop in. In the driver's seat, a man Leo doesn't recognize flicks his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk, where it lands next to Leo's sneaker. Mickey says he's found the bike. He will buy it if it's the one Leo wants. Mickey can't remember if it's a Trek or not — he thinks it is. It'll just take a second — he's seen the bike in a shop downtown and it isn't too expensive. If they go right now, if Leo will just get in the car and ... it'll just take a minute, his grandmother won't even know he's gone — she doesn't even know he's here yet — then Mickey'll know whether or not it's the bike to buy for Leo's birthday. They'll bring him right back, they promise.

So his grandmother won't worry, they put his Schwinn in the trunk. "If she sees the bike lying in the yard, we don't want her wondering where you are, do we?" Mickey says.

Leo agrees and climbs in the backseat.

Mickey's friend, the driver, smiles in the rearview mirror. "You like bikes, huh?"

This is too good to be true. This is maybe some crazy dream.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Year of Needy Girls by Patricia A. Smith. Copyright © 2017 Patricia A. Smith. Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

"Smith is an artist of prose, utilizing her palette to create a complex landscape of anger and ignorance...Extremely relevant."
— Thoughts on This n' That

" The Year of Needy Girls is a study in hypocrisy and small-town secrets. Patricia A. Smith's contemporary witch hunt north of Boston is a collision of The Children's Hour and Mystic River. "
— Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing

" The Year of Needy Girls is as much about how fear can cloud our perceptions of both self and other as it is about the persistent search for love and home. Patricia A. Smith's vision is at once keen and generous."
— Elizabeth Graver, author of The End of the Point

"This is one of those compulsively readable novels that keeps you up far too late at night. A thrum of dread begins on the opening pages, and yet the two heroines are so compassionately drawn, so understandably flawed, that you keep hoping, against all reason, that nothing will happen to them. Patricia A. Smith's portrait of a paranoid community is gripping: a Salem of the twenty-first century."
— Suzanne Berne , author of the The Dogs of Littlefield

From the Publisher

2016-10-05
When a 10-year-old boy is murdered and a high school teacher is accused of molesting a student, a small Massachusetts town is rocked to its ignorant core.In the prologue of Smith’s debut novel, a Little Leaguer named Leo Rivera is kidnapped by his next-door neighbor, an unprepossessing auto mechanic named Mickey Gilberto. Not long after, Leo’s corpse is found at the bottom of the river in a plastic container. Meanwhile, lesbian Deirdre Murphy, a dedicated and popular French teacher at a private girls’ school, has been canned because an uptight mom witnessed her daughter planting an unsolicited kiss on the teacher’s lips. These two events tangle in the public imagination to produce a citywide outbreak of homophobia and a weirdly nonsuspenseful witch hunt, since the reader already knows who did and didn’t do what to whom. On the same day Deirdre loses her job, her librarian partner, SJ, attempts to break off their relationship, though bad timing prevents the severing of the limp connection. SJ has also recently received a problematic smooch—hers from the murderous pedophile Mickey Gilberto, whom she’s been tutoring in reading at the library. Even after the unasked-for kiss, she can’t help thinking he’s a nice guy. Alienated as they are, Deirdre and SJ can give each other no support as they endure their twin trials; each mentally muddles through her own back story and future prospects as she becomes the focus of police and public suspicion. The most promising part of this book is the depiction of Deirdre’s teaching, but it's buried under an avalanche of half-baked elements: police work on the two cases, unconvincing letters to the local paper, two-dimensional supporting characters, and unwarranted allusions to The Scarlet Letter. “How did Hester Prynne do it? she wondered. How did she face the town with her quiet pride and go on living her life, raising Pearl, not minding what anyone said or did? Deirdre didn’t think she had the strength in her.” Bites off more than it can possibly chew, then—poof—makes it all go away in the last 20 pages.

Kirkus Reviews