One of Nylon's "50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017"
One of Chicago Reader's "Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017"
A father searches for his addict son while grappling with his own choices as a parent (and as a user of sorts)
In Lindsay Hunter's achingly funny, fiercely honest second novel, Eat Only When You're Hungry, we meet Greg-an overweight fifty-eight-year-old and the father of Greg Junior, GJ, who has been missing for three weeks. GJ's been an addict his whole adult life, disappearing for days at a time, but for some reason this absence feels different, and Greg has convinced himself that he's the only one who can find his son. So he rents an RV and drives from his home in West Virginia to the outskirts of Orlando, Florida, the last place GJ was seen. As we travel down the streets of the bizarroland that is Florida, the urgency to find GJ slowly recedes into the background, and the truths about Greg's mistakes-as a father, a husband, a man-are uncovered.
In Eat Only When You're Hungry, Hunter elicits complex sympathy for her characters, asking the listener to take a closer look at the way we think about addiction-why we demonize the junkie but turn a blind eye to drinking a little too much or eating too much-and the fallout of failing ourselves.
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.
“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
