From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times best seller Nightcrawling here is
an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers
in a small town on the Florida panhandle. Adela is sixteen years old. When she tells her
parents she's pregnant they send her from their home in Indiana to her grandmother’s in Padua
Beach Florida "a town built on y’all bein good now? and babies havin babies said in the
rasp of a loud whisper in the back of a church." There Adela meets Emory who has a baby of
her own she brings to high school strapped to her chest and Simone ringleader of “the Girls
” a group of teenage mothers who hang out with their growing brood in the back of her red
truck—dancing defiantly breastfeeding watching the kids and having each other's backs. The
town thinks they've lost their way but really they are finding it: looking for love making
and breaking friendships navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood. But
before long they will find themselves on a collision course with one another. Full of heart
and life and hope set against shifting sands of power and betrayal The Girls Who Grew Big
confirms Leila Mottley's promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be
a young woman.
