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Book Summary and Reviews of Girls with Long Shadows by Tennessee Hill

Girls with Long Shadows by Tennessee Hill

Girls with Long Shadows

A Novel

by Tennessee Hill

  • Publishes:
  • May 6, 2025, 304 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

With the haunting, romantic voyeurism of The Virgin Suicides and the atmosphere and emotional intensity of Where the Crawdads Sing, an intoxicating Southern Gothic debut novel about identical triplets whose lives are devastated when their burgeoning desires turn deadly.

Identical triplets Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C Binderup were welcomed into the world as their mother was ushered out of it, leaving them nameless and in the care of their Gram, Isadora. Nineteen years later, the triplets work at their Gram's crumbling golf course in Longshadow, Texas, where the ever-watchful eyes of the town observe them serving up glasses of ice-cold lemonade to golfers, swimming in the murky waters of the neighboring bayou, or slipping t-shirts off their sunburnt shoulders in hopes of attracting the kind of attention they are only beginning to understand.

Cautious Baby B watches as lustful Baby A and introverted Baby C find matches among the town boys. Even Baby B has noticed that the town's golden boy seems to be intrigued by her, only her. Just as each girl's desire to be seen for herself is becoming fulfilled, a seemingly trivial kiss is bestowed on the wrong sister, leading to a moment of unspeakable violence that will upend the triplets' world forever.

Pulsating with menace and narrated with hypnotic lyricism, Girls with Long Shadows is an electrifying literary thriller that captures how female teenage angst can turn lethal when insecurities are weaponized and sibling bonds are severed. Tense, lush, and painfully beautiful, it forces us to consider the lengths to which we will go to claim our own personhood.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Girls with Long Shadows, Tennessee Hill's riveting debut novel, is a brilliant, engrossing portrait of three sisters and the bonds of love and betrayal. Babies A, B, and C—triplet girls whose mother died young—move from a plural unity to their splintered selves within a town where the chorus of voices and history provide an emotionally charged backdrop for all that plays out. Hill is a gifted talent and I look forward to more." —Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of Old Crimes and Life After Life

"Girls with Long Shadows is like nothing I've read before, yet achingly familiar in its complex portrayal of sisters, identity, and teenage girlhood. Atmospheric, addictive, a beating heart of a book. Tennessee Hill writes like a dream." —Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild and Maddalena and the Dark

"A poetic, haunting, haunted novel—as suspenseful as it is lyrical. Within a sisterhood that's more like self-replication, Girls with Long Shadows maps the shimmering contours of identity and unfolds the kinds of damage only our most beloved can do to us. Baby B and her sisters moved and unsettled me and worked their way deep under my skin." —Clare Beams, author of The Garden

This information about Girls with Long Shadows 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.

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Author Information

Tennessee Hill

Tennessee Hill holds an MFA from North Carolina State University. Her work has been featured in Poetry magazine, Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Adroit Journal, Arkansas International, and elsewhere. She is a native of South Texas, where she still lives and teaches with her husband and their dog.

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