The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley
The Girls Who Grew Big had me gripped from the very first page and never let me go. Set in a small coastal town in the Florida panhandle, it follows the fortunes of three young women, Adela, Emory and Simone – part of a group of teenage mothers known as The Girls – as they navigate desire, friendship, poverty, motherhood, their own ambitions and the community’s disdain for them. Told in lyrical prose, and filled with characters who positively leap off the page, The Girls Who Grew Big is shot through with the ferocity of a mother’s love, proving that Mottley’s much-feted debut Nightcrawling was no fluke.
The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley, (List Price: $28, Knopf, 9780593801123, June 2025)
Reviewed by Jude Burke-Lewis, Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
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I wanted to write a controlled, intense, strange, sensual, truthful novel set firmly in a genre I’m increasingly thinking of as wonder. You can watch a romcom where someone is covered with bees and they’re terrified, and you’re laughing, so their experience is not the same as your experience. Likewise, you can be watching a horror film, and they think they’re having a normal Monday, and you know better. That’s where the horror happens.
I like my stories to be immersive. I am a visual person when writing and reading. So to me, it’s all part of the characterization: the way that they wear clothes, what the clothes look like, what they look like. I also want it to be a lived-in world. So let’s talk about getting dirty. Let’s talk about taking baths. Let’s think about chapped lips. When I watch particularly fantasy content, I almost look for these things because it is a layer of grittiness that I like, a texture in a story, that I feel is real. The Knight and the Moth was really fun, like gossamer versus armor. You can look into themes of these things too and apply them to the story, or you can decide to read them very literally.
