With Ugly Girls, Lindsay Hunter delivers a powerful, voice-driven novel with the breakneck pace that people have come to expect from her.
The Chicago Tribune called her stories "Mesmerizing…visceral…exquisite." The Boston Globe called them "incredibly urgent." And now we have the great pleasure of Lindsay Hunter's searing, poignant, hilarious first novel.
Ugly Girls, at its core, is about the friendship between two girls, Perry and Baby Girl, and how that friendship descends into chaos, taking their world and the identities they hold dear with it. Their friendship is woven from the threads of never-ending dares and the struggle with power; their loyalty, something they attend to like a pet but forget to feed. Ugliness is something they trade between themselves, one ugly on the outside and one on the inside.
While the girls spend their nights sneaking out, stealing cars for joyrides, and eating french fries at the twenty-four-hour Denny's, danger lurks. Jamey is pining after Perry from behind the computer screen inside his mother's trailer. He's been watching the girls for a while, on Facebook and in person—though they've never seen him in the flesh—posing as a boy from a high school a couple of neighborhoods over. When they finally do meet Jamey face-to-face, they quickly realize he's far from a nice high school boy, and the girls will do whatever is necessary to protect themselves.
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“Was innocence ever an option for Perry and Baby Girl? They’ve bonded over skipping school and joyriding in stolen cars, but what they really share is a deep sense of loss…One bad choice follows another, fear triumphs over compassion, and the whirlwind of hopelessness grows. Acclaimed short story writer Hunter’s debut novel is a gritty and unrelenting baring of lost souls that pulls readers along. The girls are not ugly, but their lives are.”
— Library Journal
“Hunter has done a superb job of establishing and maintaining mood and tone while creating a story that is compulsively readable. And that ending…!”
— Booklist“Two high school girls put on a tough act to hide deep-seated insecurities in this gripping character-driven novel…A haunting portrait of longing.”
— Kirkus Reviews“Lindsay Hunter is the mistress of grit, all the dirty little details that make a story feel real and sad and true.”
— Jami Attenberg, author of The MiddlesteinsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collections Don’t Kiss Me and Daddy’s. She lives in Chicago, where she is the cofounder and cohost of the flash-fiction reading series Quickies!
Kathleen Early, a five-time winner of the Earphones Award for audiobook narration, is also a television, film, and stage actress. She studied at the University of Oklahoma, the Oxford School of Drama, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville before moving to New York City, where she understudied on Broadway and toured nationally. Her television credits include recurring roles on Miami Medical and Grey’s Anatomy.