Changes

|title=Girlchild

|author=Tupelo Hassman

|publisher=Quercus

|date=August 2012

|website=http://tupelohassman.com

|video=35gJpcUtISw

|summary=Tupelo Hassman has written something astounding, being humorous, deeply touching, and something that will hopefully help to change attitudes. Whatever our personal story, place in the world, dreams and hopes this novel encourages empathy whilst leaving a lingering tinge of shame that 'girlchildren' still exist invisibly, and not just in the U.S.

}}

Rory Dawn Hendrix (RD for short) lives with her mother in the ironically named Calle de las Flores or Street of Flowers; a pretty name masking a less than idyllic setting. For Calle is a trailer park for those living a life sentence of poverty, the inhabitants being as upwardly mobile as their static, seedy homes. RD has half brothers but they live with their father, leaving RD to live alone with her mother and nearby grandmother, a father being a luxury that Rory Dawn has learnt to live without. Rory Dawn is also a Girl Scout and has a handbook to prove it but she's in a troop of one, alone with the ideals of an organisation that she only glimpses through disadvantage and in the same way that she glimpses the materialistic world beyond her means. However, her mother wants more for her than the teen pregnancies that seem to have become their family heirloom and there is hope as RD is highly intelligent; but can this be enough?