“Momma raised me right till she refused to raise me at all.”
“They wanted us to be anything but what we were.”
“’Cause hundreds of years ago, some pirate ship sunk and spilled treasures all over the bottom of our sea and now the water shines emerald green for us and if that don’t make us treasures too, I don’t know what does. So even when we havin’ a hard time, you just remember the world gon’ send you some treasures when you need it most, even if it takes hundreds of years to see ‘em shine.”
Leila Mottley was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize with Nightcrawling, and her 2025 release, The Girls Who Grew Big (Knopf 2025) made my prediction list but didn’t make the actual long list. (It should have. Swap Love Forms for this. What Mottley does with language is such a gift.)
Much like Nightcrawling, The Girls Who Grew Big deals with an unsavory subject matter – teenage pregnancy and teens who choose to get pregnant and choose to raise their children. Their choices are not “socially acceptable,” and the book is not a teachable moment against childhood pregnancy; it’s raw and jagged, this story of near feral girls not yet women, but it’s one of the most beautiful books about sisterhood and found families I’ve read. These girls are pushed to the outskirts of society; shunned, judged, and abandoned by their families, they find support and strength in each other.
Sectioned in trimesters and told from the POV of Simone (leader of the Girls), Emory (raised by her racist grandparents and Simone’s brother’s baby mama), and Adela (rich, biracial girl from Indiana with aspirations of being on the Olympic swim team sent to Florida to stay with her paternal grandmother, have the baby, and return like nothing happened – her mother wouldn’t let her have an abortion). It’s Adela who breaks the Girls. Adela who gets broken. Adela who helps put pieces back together.
The sandy grit from the Florida beach is in the pages, in the words, in your mouth. The Girls Who Grew Big is something special. And so is Mottley.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 