Sweetgirl: A Novel

by Travis Mulhauser

Overview

With the heart, daring, and evocative atmosphere of Winter’s Bone and True Grit, and driven by the raw, whip-smart voice of Percy James, a blistering debut about a fearless sixteen-year old girl whose search for her missing mother leads to an unexpected discovery, and a life or death struggle in the harsh frozen landscape of the Upper Midwest.

As a blizzard bears down, Percy James sets off to find her troubled mother, Carletta. For years, Percy has had to take care of herself and Mama—a woman who’s been unraveling for as long as her daughter can remember. Fearing Carletta is strung out on meth and that she won’t survive the storm, Percy heads for Shelton Potter’s cabin, deep in the woods of Northern Michigan. A two-bit criminal, as incompetent as he his violent, Shelton has been smoking his own cook and grieving the death of his beloved Labrador, Old Bo.

But when Percy arrives, there is no sign of Carletta. Searching the house, she finds Shelton and his girlfriend drugged into oblivion—and a crying baby girl left alone in a freezing room upstairs. From the moment the baby wraps a tiny hand around her finger, Percy knows she must save her—a split-second decision that is the beginning of a dangerous odyssey in which she must battle the elements and evade Shelton and a small band of desperate criminals, hell-bent on getting that baby back.

Knowing she and the child cannot make it alone, Percy seeks help from Carletta’s ex, Portis Dale, who is the closest thing she’s ever had to a father. As the storm breaks and violence erupts, Percy will be forced to confront the haunting nature of her mother’s affliction and finds her own fate tied more and more inextricably to the baby she is determined to save.

Filled with the sweeping sense of cultural and geographic isolation of its setting—the hills of fictional Cutler County in northern Michigan—and told in Percy’s unflinching style, Sweetgirl is an affecting exploration of courage, sacrifice, and the ties that bind—a taut and darkly humorous tour-de-force that is horrifying, tender, and hopeful.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062400833
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	11/01/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,101,602
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Travis Mulhauser is from Petoskey, Michigan. He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and two children.

Editorial Reviews

” A riveting novel... far, far funnier than it has any right to be. If you’re a fan of Charles Portis and Denis Johnson—and if you’re not, then you should be—then this is book is exactly what you’ve been wanting, what you’ve been waiting for.” — Brock Clarke, author of The Happiest People in the World

“[Sweetgirl is] filled with true wit, cunning, and the unwanted wisdom of a child denied a childhood. This novel comes on like the blizzard at its center, and leaves you dazzled and dazed not only by how much Travis Mulhauser knows, but how deeply he cares.” — Michael Parker, author of All I Have in this World

“There’s a big old neon heart pulsing on every page of Sweetgirl, like the sign to a bar you can’t help but enter. I felt thrilled and shocked, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages. Travis Mulhauser is a writer to be reckoned with.” — Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls and Don't Kiss Me

“Sweetgirl is a gritty, compelling novel of a world where even a sixteen-year-old must confront what Edith Wharton called ‘the hard considerations of the poor.’ Mulhauser depicts his people and their landscape with uncompromising fidelity.” — Ron Rash

“[A] compulsively readable novel...finish the first chapter and you will be hooked...violent, dark, and impressively redemptive... Sweetgirl is a upper-Midwestern homage to great American quest novels like True Grit and Winter’s Bone. It is a truly memorable and remarkable read.” — Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs

“The perfect balance of humor and heartache... a masterful debut... as wise as it is suspenseful, as funny as it is tragic... written with guts, grit, and grace, Sweetgirl is the book you want to keep you company on a cold winter’s night.” — Ploughshares, Best Books of the New Year

“Sweetgirl works on so many levels, it’s difficult to know how to classify it... hilarious, heartbreaking and true, a major accomplishment from an author who looks certain to have an impressive career ahead of him.” — NPR

A lean gutpunch of a novel surfaced from Cutler County this month, and its name is Sweetgirl—a lyrical tale that practically demands to be read in a single sitting. — Paste Magazine

“smart, taut, and believable writing” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Mulhauser has created a suspenseful tale of sadness and redemption.” — Herald-Sun (Durham, NC)

“So good that I read a few paragraphs aloud to my podiatrist... “Sweetgirl,” by Travis Mulhauser of Durham. Though meth and drugs infest almost every page, this debut novel is chillingly lyrical and filled with a love so raw and fierce it takes your breath.” — Charlotte Observer

“Though the story takes place in a chaotic Michigan blizzard, fans of Ozark-based grit lit will feel right at home in Travis Mulhauser’s gorgeous, lyrical Sweetgirl... With characters that toe the line between doom and hope, Sweetgirl delivers compelling, emotional resonance.” — Paste Magazine

“[Y]ou can’t help but smile at this disarmingly original novel... Travis Mulhauser traverses a wobbling slack line across a moral crevasse that few of us will experience. Yet there’s a devastating credibility to the events he creates.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[L]ean yet poetic prose” — Popmatters.com

“The writing is gorgeous and the stakes rise steadily from the moment Percy first sets out, making this slim novel surprisingly vicious and taut.” — Bookriot.com

From the Publisher

There’s a big old neon heart pulsing on every page of Sweetgirl, like the sign to a bar you can’t help but enter. I felt thrilled and shocked, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages. Travis Mulhauser is a writer to be reckoned with.

Lindsay Hunter

The perfect balance of humor and heartache... a masterful debut... as wise as it is suspenseful, as funny as it is tragic... written with guts, grit, and grace, Sweetgirl is the book you want to keep you company on a cold winter’s night.

Best Books of the New Year Ploughshares

Sweetgirl works on so many levels, it’s difficult to know how to classify it... hilarious, heartbreaking and true, a major accomplishment from an author who looks certain to have an impressive career ahead of him.

NPR

smart, taut, and believable writing

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Sweetgirl is a gritty, compelling novel of a world where even a sixteen-year-old must confront what Edith Wharton called ‘the hard considerations of the poor.’ Mulhauser depicts his people and their landscape with uncompromising fidelity.

Ron Rash

[L]ean yet poetic prose

Popmatters.com

So good that I read a few paragraphs aloud to my podiatrist... “Sweetgirl,” by Travis Mulhauser of Durham. Though meth and drugs infest almost every page, this debut novel is chillingly lyrical and filled with a love so raw and fierce it takes your breath.

Charlotte Observer

10/19/2015
When plucky 16-year-old Percy James discovers that her feckless mother, Carletta, is missing from their shabby home in a decaying town at the northwest tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula, she jumps in her pickup truck and sets off during a blizzard to look for Carletta at the drug den of Shelton Potter, a maker and dealer of methamphetamine. Carletta is not there, and Shelton and his girlfriend are conked out, but Percy finds a baby girl crying in a freezing-cold bedroom and impulsively grabs her, determined to get the baby to a hospital. Percy enlists the help of her mother’s ex-boyfriend, Portis Dale, a gentlemanly alcoholic who greets her by saying, fondly, “Well, shit the bed.” This event-filled debut novel then alternates between Percy’s desperate attempts to elude a vengeful Shelton, and Shelton’s own slow-witted ruminations as he mumbles around the snow-filled woods with his trusty Glock pistol. By the time Carletta shows up and the baby is succored, four men have died: by incineration, by a gun mistakenly fired, by suicide, and by running a snowmobile into a tree. To his credit, Mulhauser evocatively describes the bleak landscape and starkly degraded social mores of an isolated community after the tourists have departed. The novel’s credibility suffers, however, from the far too clever and unlikely dialogue spoken by unsavory characters as they consume a prodigious amount of whiskey. A virtually illiterate “scumbag” mutters, “It’s an academic point”; another character, who has never left the remote backwoods, refuses to become “one of those pieces of human installation art.” Yet the novel succeeds as a coming-of-age story when Percy, having survived grisly violence and abysmal loss, experiences a realization about how to shape her future. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

[Sweetgirl is] filled with true wit, cunning, and the unwanted wisdom of a child denied a childhood. This novel comes on like the blizzard at its center, and leaves you dazzled and dazed not only by how much Travis Mulhauser knows, but how deeply he cares.

Michael Parker

[A] compulsively readable novel...finish the first chapter and you will be hooked...violent, dark, and impressively redemptive... Sweetgirl is a upper-Midwestern homage to great American quest novels like True Grit and Winter’s Bone. It is a truly memorable and remarkable read.

Nickolas Butler

” A riveting novel... far, far funnier than it has any right to be. If you’re a fan of Charles Portis and Denis Johnson—and if you’re not, then you should be—then this is book is exactly what you’ve been wanting, what you’ve been waiting for.

Brock Clarke

Mulhauser has created a suspenseful tale of sadness and redemption.

Herald-Sun (Durham

A lean gutpunch of a novel surfaced from Cutler County this month, and its name is Sweetgirl—a lyrical tale that practically demands to be read in a single sitting.

Paste Magazine

[Y]ou can’t help but smile at this disarmingly original novel... Travis Mulhauser traverses a wobbling slack line across a moral crevasse that few of us will experience. Yet there’s a devastating credibility to the events he creates.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

The writing is gorgeous and the stakes rise steadily from the moment Percy first sets out, making this slim novel surprisingly vicious and taut.

Bookriot.com

So good that I read a few paragraphs aloud to my podiatrist... “Sweetgirl,” by Travis Mulhauser of Durham. Though meth and drugs infest almost every page, this debut novel is chillingly lyrical and filled with a love so raw and fierce it takes your breath.

Charlotte Observer

11/01/2015
A self-sufficient 16-year-old girl searches for her meth-addicted parent in the deep woods: if that sounds familiar, you probably read Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone (or saw the movie with Jennifer Lawrence in her star-making role), but it also serves as the setup for Mulhauser's debut. As northern Michigan prepares for a blizzard, Percy James knows her mother, Carletta, is strung out somewhere, and local meth cook Shelton Potter's dilapidated cabin is the most obvious candidate for her retrieval. What Percy finds there instead is a screaming baby, left alone in a crib with the window open, while Shelton and the baby's mother lie immobilized in the other room. Plucking the baby she calls "sweetgirl" out of her crib, Percy has only one person to turn to for help: her mother's onetime lover Dale Portis, a lonesome curmudgeon whom Percy considers a second father. Together, they try to find Carletta and get the baby proper medical attention before the storm prevents them from escaping the woods, just as Shelton wakes up and marshals all of his criminal forces to reclaim the child. VERDICT Though it never fully escapes the shadow of Woodrell's famous novel, this title boasts fine writing and memorable characters, making it a solid pick for readers who enjoy Woodrell or Tom Franklin.—Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Library Journal

2015-11-04
A first-time novelist borrows well-worn tropes. Percy James is 16 years old and an orphan, basically. Her mother might not be dead, but she's not exactly around, either. Percy is, in fact, searching a meth dealer's house for the missing Carletta when she finds a baby named Jenna and, on impulse, snatches the infant from her crib. Will the neglected teen enlist the help of a responsible social worker in finding a more salubrious environment for both herself and Jenna? Oh, heavens no. She will, instead, take the cold, filth-covered foundling to the home of her mother's ex, a gruff-but-kindly alcoholic. Will the baby's mother and her meth-cooking boyfriend even notice the baby is gone, and will they care? Yes and yes! Drug-addled, gun-crazy rural high jinks ensue. One expects a narrative of this sort to unfold against an Appalachian setting—or within the swampy confines of the Florida panhandle, maybe. That Mulhauser has, instead, situated the fictional Cutler County at the northernmost point of Michigan's Lower Peninsula is definitely the most original part of his novel. Percy, certainly, is an established type. She's wise beyond her years, committed to doing the right thing despite—or is it because of?—the hardships she has endured. And, like every other character in this novel, she speaks with a folksy eloquence that requires strenuous suspension of disbelief. "While the particulars of a given calamity may be impossible to predict, while I could never say I expected to find a baby in the bedroom, chaos itself was always confirmation of the dread I carried certain in my bones." Only a reader who is willing to believe that any teenager has ever expressed such a thought is capable of appreciating this book. Maybe enjoy a Coen brothers double feature—Raising Arizona and Fargo—instead.

Kirkus Reviews