Hick

The heroine of Andrea Portes’s first novel is Luli, a smart-mouthed 13-year-old from impoverished Nebraska. After being abandoned by her negligent, drunken parents (which seems like it might be a good thing), Luli decides she needs to hitchhike to Las Vegas to find a sugardaddy. Things go awry almost instantly when she meets a bad-news drifter named Eddie. She also runs into Glenda, a captivating, coke-snorting grifter with whom Luli becomes enthralled. There are many adventures and some tragedy along the way, culminating in violence as Eddie, Luli and Glenda meet again.

Luli longs for a life away from the narrow and stifling existence that she knows in her raggedy hometown. She is cagey enough to know what awaits her there if she stays, so at the first chance she gets, she bolts. One can only applaud her self-preservation instincts. Portes has created a series of characters that one might see at a rest stop on some lonesome highway. Grifters, cheats and crocked men live in the pages of Portes’s book, inhabiting the dry expanse of road she has chosen to place them on.

Luli’s voice is full of Southern lyricism and sass. It’s obvious she’s not a typical 13-year-old: She’s more adult than her neglectful parents, she carries a gun gifted to her by her Uncle Nipper, and she makes comments on the deeply flawed world around her with a gimlet eye and sharp tongue.

Perhaps it’s her seen-too-much, tougher-than-nails attitude that grates on the reader over the course of the book. Luli is so indomitable, tough and spirited that she almost becomes a caricature of herself. It’s hard to read a novel like this without comparing it to Dorothy Allison’s excellent and seminal 1992 novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. The books both have scrappy girl protagonists, horrible parents, violence and heartbreak, but the voice works in Allison’s novel. In Hick, it’s tough to believe. Luli sounds like a writer trying to sound like a young, uneducated girl struggling through something.—Beth Dugan