Audiobook Review - The Girls Who Grew Big

Title: The Girls Who Grew Big

Author: Leila Mottley

Publisher: Knopf

Genre: Literary Fiction

{Thank you @prhaudio for the #gifted audiobook of The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley.  This is a 3 POV story which is fabulously narrated by AhDream Smith, Erin Spencer, and Khaya Fraites.  I love when we get multiple narrators for multiple POVs.}

Reading can do many things.  It can take you places.  It can be an escape.  It can be educational.  And in the case of this story, it can be prospective to a lifestyle, a world, an upbringing, a hand that was dealt—much different than your/my own.  Reading can teach you compassion.

Leila Mottley writes the most beautiful words.  Every sentence is special.  This story was raw, real, and vulnerable.

🤰’The Girls’ 🤰

Simone - Simone is a black teenage girl who comes from a religious family.  When she gets pregnant as a teen, her parent’s kick her out.  She goes from living in a trailer park to a beat up old red pickup truck—the same truck she gave birth to twins in.  She lives on the beaches of the FL panhandle and begins guiding other girls with her truck becoming a meeting point.  She becomes the mother of the group.

Emory - Emory is a white girl in high school who is incredible smart and has big dreams of studying Biology.  She ends up pregnant by Simone’s brother.  While she still lives at home with her grandparents and goes to school, there is a lot of tension and her grandparents won’t allow the father of her baby to come around because he’s Black.

Adela - Adela is a biracial teenager who comes to live with her grandmother.  She was training to be a swimming olympian.  Her parents are wealthy and religious.  There plan is for her to give the baby up for adoption and fake a study abroad so no one in her community knows what is going on.

The bond these girls have.  This coming-of-age story.  The exploration of race, class, and identity was so well done.  This was a special one that I highly recommend! 4.5 ⭐️