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.

Mulhauser's debut novel is gritty and suspenseful yet overflowing with heart, hope, and humor. Narrator Cassandra Morris is extraordinary as the voice of 16-year-old Percy James, a young woman who is committed to her dysfunctional family yet resourceful and mature enough to rise above them. Mulhauser also gives unique voices to the characters who interact with Percy. Macleod Andrews has a different challenge as he narrates alternating chapters that tell the story from the perspective of Shelton Potter, a lowlife drug dealer who uses more product than he sells. Somehow Andrews manages to speak Shelton's thoughts intimately while keeping the distance of the third-person voice, an approach that shines a light on Shelton's drug-addled thought processes. A tour de force. N.E.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine