Girl Trouble
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Girl Trouble, a Harper Perennial paperback original, is Rona Jaffe Award winner Holly Goddard Jones’s debut short story collection, set around small-town Southerners caught in moral and sometimes mortal quandaries. Written with extraordinary empathy and maturity, and with the breadth and complexity of a novel, these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories explore the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence.
A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant—with his child. The nightmare of a college student's rape and murder is relived by both her mother and her killer, whose contradictory accounts call to question the very nature of victimhood. In these eight stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.
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Author Extras
Reading Guides:
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Critical Praise for
Girl Trouble
“Gritty, eloquent dispatches from the heartland. . . . Jones’ hauntingly accomplished language lifts the mundane to the level of profound tragedy.”
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Chicago Tribune
“Jones writes with grace and ease, the selections adding up to a powerful sum of reflection, loss and regret.”
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Publishers Weekly
“This masterful debut dramatizes the fortitude of small-town southerners confronting situations gone terribly wrong and the shadowed boundaries of love, morality, and violence. . . . Jones’ seemingly effortless style makes the eight tales quietly powerful and achingly human.”
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Booklist
“Gritty, eloquent dispatches from the heartland. . . . Jones’ hauntingly accomplished language lifts the mundane to the level of profound tragedy.”
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Chicago Tribune
“Powerful . . . Strong, subtly nuanced.”
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The News & Observer
“In her debut collection, Jones roams deeply familiar short-story territory: small-town betrayal, violence, grief. Fortunately, she also seems to have mastered the genre’s best trick: a charismatic energy, down in the spaces between every word, that makes you feel like she’s the first to ever write about these things.”
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New York magazine
“Poignant and approachable-ripe for any audience. The human touch and prairie isolation of her characters are pitch perfect. . . . Jones’ prose is also sharply intellectual. With a debut as striking as Girl Trouble, Jones could very well join the tradition of America’s great Southern writers.”
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New York Press
“The stories from Girl Trouble are poignant and approachable-ripe for any audience. The human touch and prairie isolation of her characters are pitch-perfect. But whether she is discussing Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in her story ‘Parts’ or riffing on Plato in ‘Allegory of a Cave,’ Jones’ prose is also sharply intellectual. With a debut as striking as Girl Trouble, Jones could very well join the tradition of America’s great Southern writers.”
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Las Vegas Weekly
“Girl Trouble resonates with black-coal sorrow and dark truths found in [Jones’s] native state’s darkest hollers. . . . Nothing is contrived; every story is steeped in reality, and clarity comes with a price.”
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The Nashville Scene
“Jones exposes a world that is darkly seductive.”
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Oxford American
“Jones’ sparkling debut collection zeroes in on lonely searching souls making do in a quiet Kentucky town.”
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People
“Holly Goddard Jones is blessed with wisdom beyond her years, a gimlet eye, and an enviable literary talent; her debut collection, GIRL TROUBLE, is a fierce and exhilarating achievement.”
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Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children
“Holly Goddard Jones is a strikingly gifted young writer, and in her debut collection,Girl Trouble, she turns a clear but compassionate eye to the nuances of small-town life, its secret undercurrents and betrayals. . . . Compelling and full of heartache, these stories are so beautifully written you won’t want them to end.”
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Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
“No politician should ever again use the phrase ‘The American People’ without reading this book, preferably twice, so that they understand at last just who the hell they’re talking about. Holly Goddard Jones has a voice as expansive, complex, and beautiful as the country itself.”
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Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End
“A grand debut of a writer who is assured, sensitive, and wonderfully skillful. . . . A marvelous work of heartbreaking wisdom.”
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Edward P. Jones
“GIRL TROUBLE is a powerful, resonant short story collection from the uniquely talented Holly Goddard Jones.”
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George Pelecanos
“The stories from Girl Trouble are poignant and approachable-ripe for any audience. The human touch and prairie isolation of her characters are pitch-perfect. . . . Sharply intellectual. With a debut as striking as Girl Trouble, Jones could very well join the tradition of America’s great Southern writers.”
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Las Vegas Weekly
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