Sweetgirl

October 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.

November 1, 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

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2015
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.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.