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From the acclaimed author of Girlchild, this gritty, irreverent novel sees a young misfit grow into hope.
Unsinkable and wrecked by grief, motherless and aimless and looking for connection, Helen Dedleder is a girl with a gift she doesn't want to use and a pack of friends who are all just helping each other get by.
So cut off from the rest of the world that even the internet is blocked (never mind traffic in and out), Rosary, California, is run by evangelicals but was named by Catholics. It's a town on very formal relations with its neighbors, one that boasts an oil refinery as well as a fairly sizable population of teenagers.
For Helen and her gang of misfits, the tire yard, sex, and beer help pass the days until they turn eighteen and leave town. Her best friends, Win and Rainbolene, late arrivals to Rosary, are particularly keen to depart―Rain because she'll finally be able to get the hormones she needs to fully become herself. Watching over them is Aunt Bev, an outcast like the kids, who runs the barely tolerated Psychic Encounter Shoppe and tries to keep Helen connected to her own psychic talents―a gift passed down from her mother. Tensions are building, though, in every way. Threats against the Psychic Encounter Shoppe become serious actions. One of the kids gets in trouble, and then another. And Helen can see some things before they happen, but somehow can't see the most important things happening right in front of her.
Tupelo Hassman's gods with a little g bursts and splinters with flawed, lovable characters whose haphazard investigations into each others's hearts will reshape your understanding of trust, how to build a family, and how to make a future you can see.
"[T]he book coalescences as a melancholy, triumphant, slightly magical coming-of-age tale...Weird and uncomfortable and glorious—just like adolescence." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This coming-of-age tale honestly and strikingly encapsulates the teenage experience." - Publishers Weekly
"Tupelo Hassman's writing makes me blather and drool. Hilarious and wise, smart and angry, tart and devastating, gods with a little g is a dark charm, full of dangerous magic. No other writer can limn the boundaries of female becoming like Hassman. Like a prism, this book possesses all the colors." - Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock: A Diary
"I couldn't put gods with a little g down. Tupelo Hassman again delivers with Helen Dedleder, an unsentimental, pragmatic, and often comical heroine. A brilliant coming-of-age story." - Willy Vlautin, author of Lean on Pete
"Tupelo Hassman has written a sacrament for girls growing up as we did, a liturgy for their irreverent, hilarious, resilient souls, a stylistically sly and beautiful book, a wild ride of a novel set in a California everyone should know." - Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here and Highwire Moon
"gods with a little g is sharp, witty, endlessly surprising, darkly comic, and bighearted to boot. The characters Tupelo Hassman has created will burrow under your skin like the illegal tattoo our narrator Helen gets in the tire yard: they will stay with you for a long time after. Just marvelous." - Annie Hartnett, author of Rabbit Cake
This information about gods with a little g was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tupelo Hassman's debut novel, girlchild, is the recipient of the American Library Association's ALEX Award. Her short fiction, Breast Milk, won Quiet Lightning's inaugural chapbook competition. She is the recipient of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Silver Pen Award, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award, and is the first American to win London's Literary Death Match. Her second novel, gods with a little g, is forthcoming from FSG in August of 2019.
Tupelo's work has been anthologized in 100WordStory's Nothing Short Of 100 (Outpost19) and in Drivel: Deliciously Bad Writing By Your Favorite Authors (TarcherPerigree). Her work has also appeared in The Boston Globe, Harper's Bazaar, The Independent, The Portland Review, Imaginary Oklahoma, and ZYZZYVA, among others.
Tupelo teaches at Santa ...
... Full Biography
Link to Tupelo Hassman's Website
Name Pronunciation
Tupelo Hassman: TOO-puh-low HAAS-man
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