Required Reading: Girl: A Novel by Bart Bare

Girl is the story of Loren Creek, a fourteen-year-old girl who lives on the family farm with her mother in the mountains of Tennessee.  Due to her mother's battle with Huntington's Chorea, Loren has taken over running the house: maintaining the house, farm,  and livestock, cooking, cleaning, and paying bills. She also cares for her mother.  When Loren's mother becomes to sick to stay at home and is hospitalized, Loren is placed in foster care.  Her first two placements are a disaster, and she makes a case to her judge, Edythe Tilson, that she be allowed to care for herself and remain at her family home.  Because of her young age, the Judge, who in her heart knows that the girl could survive on her own, cannot agree, and upon her mother's death, Loren is placed in a third, and decidedly better, foster home.  At this point, though, the judge's two teenage daughters have become involved, and the three girls have made plans for Loren to run away from her foster family to Boone, North Carolina, where the older Tilson daughter will be attending Appalachian State in the fall.  Loren Creek will become Lorne Land and will avoid detection by living as a boy.

Loren successfully runs away and finds a friend and supporter in an old widower farmer named Fields Gragg.  Fields agrees to help Loren in her deception and allows her to rent his family home.  The two become fast friends, and Loren comes to call Fields "Grandpa," not just as part of the ruse, but as true testament of her love for him.  Faked documents allow Loren to enroll at High Country High as Lorne Land where she soon develops a close circle of friends and gains the respect of classmates and teachers alike.  Loren maintains her friendship with the Tilson daughters, spending every Sunday afternoon with them.  She runs for the cross country team and eventually joins the football team to fill the need for a kicker.  Loren struggles with the need to be boy and the desire to be a girl, but manages to stay successfully safe from detection by her determined social worker, Mr. Herms. Loren even manages to find Fields Gragg's first love, his teacher Miss Beverly, who he quickly marries.

Loren faces a number of serious challenges to her life as a boy, but two particular incidents lead to the eventual unraveling of her male persona.  First, she is brutally attacked by the jealous ex-boyfriend of Meredith Tilson.  The boy, Lance, is first jealous of the relationship he believes to exist between Meredith and "Lorne," but, just prior to his attack, he discovers that "Lorne" is actually a girl.  Drunk, he breaks into her home and attempts to rape her, but Loren defends herself and is rescued by Fields and his dog, Sugar, both of whom nearly kill Lance.  Trouble from Lance's wealthy father threatens the safety of Loren's identity, but determination and kindness from Fields leads to a friendship with Lance's parents and a second chance for Lance.  Second, Loren takes a bad hit in a football game after scoring a touchdown and winds up in the hospital.  Obviously, her pretended gender comes to light and soon everyone knows the truth.  After hearing her story, though, her friends, coach, and even teachers support her. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to keep her hidden from Mr. Herms, and Loren winds up in court again in front of Judge Tilson so that final decision can be made about her placement. When Mr. Herms shows up with Loren's biological father, Virgil Richards, whom she had never met and who never knew his daughter existed, a deal is struck: Loren will be the responsibility of her father who will allow her to continue living next to Fields and Beverly Gragg and finish high school at High Country High.  Loren learns over time that her mother's belief that her father was unfaithful was untrue, and that her father did not abandon them: her mother simply never told him Loren existed.  Virgil also begins a relationship with Judge Tilson that ultimately ends in marriage, making Loren and the two Tilson daughters true sisters.

Girl is a coming-of-age novel.  Loren has to learn about love and friendship and has to learn the difference between charity and kindness.  Her stubborn refusal of assistance at first acts to her detriment, but through her relationship with Meredith and Tara Tilson and Fields Gragg, she comes to understand the power of love and friendship and learns that leaning on others in not, in fact, a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.

Personally, I did not enjoy Girl.  While Loren Creek is a compelling character and the premise of her story is an interesting and moving on, I felt that the delivery of the story was weak at best.  Although I understand the concept of "suspension of disbelief" when reading fiction, there were a number of aspects of the story I found difficult to believe.  For example, I didn't understand why Mattie Hooks didn't simply take Loren on as her charge and move into Loren's house.  Mattie was living with her son, who had no children for her to care for, and was the executor of Sarah Creek's will, so it seemed reasonable to me that this would be a perfect solution to Loren's problem, one I would've expected Loren's mother to specify in her will. Also, although I really liked the character of Fields Gragg, the idea that an old man would rent his family home to a fourteen-year-old girl pretending to be a boy seemed like a stretch.  In most cases, such an arrangement would also seem quite suspicious.  I didn't find the complete turn around in Lance's father as a result of his relationship with Fields to be believable either.  Call me cynical, but Willard Van Ripper did not seem like the kind of person who would or could change, and his complete turn around seemed to good to believe. Furthermore, I didn't buy that the courts would let Loren or Fields Gragg off so easily, no matter how many letters people sent to the governor. There were also two cases in the novel that I thought a little too easy and obvious: the marriage of Fields and Beverly and the relationship between Virgil and Edythe.

Another problem I had with the novel was a number of loose ends.  The apparent attraction between Loren and Bryce early on, the more obvious attraction between Loren and Meredith later, and the Lance storyline.  None of these issues were successfully resolved in the novel, and I felt that the author either should have cut them out completely or given them the time needed for an adequate resolution. I also noted some discrepancies in the novel.  For example, Meredith's proclamation at one point that she would pursue the law like her mother and her later change to pre-med without explanation.  Obviously, people change majors all the time, but this change seemed out of place for this character, almost as if the author had simply forgotten what he wrote earlier.

Overall, I felt that the writing in Girl was weak, the editing was sloppy, and the publishing was unprofessional.  For me, the writing didn't flow, the story wasn't well organized or developed, and the use of dialect seemed unnatural at times. The author claims in the afterword that his editor corrected hundreds of mistakes, but unfortunately, she seemed to miss hundreds more.  As far as the publishing, I thought the formatting (i.e. font, layout) looked unprofessional at best, cheap at worst. The novel was locally published, and that fact is abundantly clear. I know that I'm giving the book a harsh criticism, but honestly, it was a hard novel for me to get through, and, had it not been required reading, I would've put it down.  The characters in the story have potential, but the authors never reaches that potential.  I understand the draw of a novel set in the local area, and perhaps my own unfamiliarity with Boone hindered my enjoyment of the novel, but I simply didn't feel that the setting saved the story.

References

Bare, B. (2010). Girl: A novel. Vilas, North Carolina: Canterbury House Publishing.