The Girls Who Grew Big

I really enjoyed Nightcrawling, so I was really anticipating this release. 

 

Like in her previous novel, in The Girls Who Grew Big, Mottley writes as her characters speak. There’s a rhythm to it. The language is sometimes crude, some passages are poetic.

 

Divided in three trimester, just like pregnancy, The girls who grew big is set in Padua Beach, Florida. We follow the lives of a group of mostly teenage mothers. There is three main girls. First, Simone, 21 who lives in her truck with her four-year-old twins. Tooth, their father, is not really present. More preoccupied about himself than about his kids. 

 

Then there’s Emory, 17, who somehow planned pregnancy. She lives with her grandparents and has been since her mom, who is addicted to drugs, abandoned her when she was little. She is white and her son Kai’s father is African American. This fact matters as her grandfather is racist.

 

Emery has never had a best friend and when she first sees Adela, she becomes fascinated, no, OBSESSED by her. She’s convinced that they are meant to be friends. So much so that she doesn’t have space or time for anyone else but Kai and Adela. 

 

And, Adela 16, who lived in Indiana with her parents until she got pregnant. She’s a competitive swimmer in school with Olympic dreams. She wanted to get an abortion, but her parents forbad it and sent her to live in Padua Beach with her grandmother so she can carry the pregnancy to term and give the baby up for adoption, and get back on track to accomplish great things. 

 

In a raw, uncompromising language, they describe their lives, their challenges, how they are perceived. They all talk about how a lot of people in the community despise them. How the omnipresence of religion in the city residents lives causes them to juge the young mothers and how theses prejudices make them feel. 

Themes explored include maternal love, responsibility, friendship, solidarity, sisterhood, prejudice, exclusion, racism and socio-economic classes. 

The author has an eloquent pen that conveys the emotions of her characters. I liked seeing them progress in their personalities, their questions and their analysis over the course of the book. I appreciated their resourcefulness, their search for value, consideration, respect and love. They are also searching to define who they are, what they want and where they want their life to go.  

Leila Mottley shows us that even if we are in the second decade of the 21^st century, there is still a double standard about teenagers having kids. The girls are rejected, but it is not the same for the boys. 

 

I really, really enjoyed this book, it’s one of my fav reads of 2025. I strongly recommend you read it!