Review: "The Girls Who Grew Big" by Leila Mottley

The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley
Published June 2025 via Knopf
★★★★

The Girls have always been there. They've been pushed aside, told that they are nothing, told that they are less than nothing. But these Girls—in a forgotten corner of Florida—are determined that if nobody will help lift them up, they will do it themselves. They will carry each other through the waves of pregnancy and early motherhood, will keep each other from drowning.

There wasn't no way to satisfy the rest of the world, but the Girls didn't care whether I used cloth diapers or graduated or stayed with Kai's daddy. They lived on whims of want and need, nomadic and ravenous and naked in their hurt. We weren't nothing like what was expected of us, and, for the first time since my baby was born, I didn't feel like the sky was about to collapse on top of me. (loc. 496*)

The Girls Who Grew Big follows an informal cluster of Girls, but it focuses on three: Simone, parenting twins and facing a future with yet another child on her hip but determined to do right by both her kids and her Girls; Emory, who is torn between doing the expected thing—marrying the father of her child—and following the dream she's worked toward for years; and Adela, who has been sent to Florida to ride out her pregnancy and finds herself toying with an alternative to her college-and-competitive-swimming expectations. Adela is probably the character I understand best, and yet she is also the wild card in this group. She's still, I think, learning the rules; she's still learning which of the rules that apply to the other Girls don't really apply to her—and which do.

It was a lonely world, Florida, and I was on the outskirts of it, catapulted onto a shore that radiated disdain, full of people who were supposed to be family but felt more like relics of a life my dad had died in and then sent me to as a punishment, to live among his ghosts. (loc. 705)

This ends up being messy in the best of ways. The Girls are trying to be good parents and to do right by their kids, and they are also still kids themselves; they have strong senses of right and wrong, but they also have, by and large, such limited resources and limited options. And again: they're still kids themselves. I've never been to Florida and have no particular plans to change that, but there's a part of me that is always drawn to stories set in the deep and reckless South, in landscapes overrun by kudzu and, in this case, characters with one eye open for alligators. This is gritty and sometimes chaotic and by the end of it I just mostly wanted to hug each of the three main characters.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotations are from an ARC and may not be final.