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TROUBLE GIRL, book 2 in the Do the Wrong Thing series, follows Ava Mueller through high school and university. She fights with her mom, searches desperately for friendship and belonging, then a teacher tells her she can write.
“Writers, artists—they’re not real people,” she thinks. “They live outside society. They don’t follow rules—oh, Mom will never allow that.”
Yet Ava doesn’t fit in anywhere.
At university, she works hard towards self-sufficiency, shooting bullets into her own feet every step of the way. The resulting chronicle is both funny and heartbreaking.
When we meet Ava at the beginning of the Do the Wrong Thing serial, she stutters through a description of her suicide attempt. “I don’t know why I did it,” she says. “It was mundane, like brushing my teeth.” Once she starts talking, however, she can’t stop, placing one memory after the other in a parade of isolated incidents that at first, don’t seem to connect.
If you like Knausgaard, Ferrante, and Rachel Cusk, you’ll love this Gen X Proust.
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What people are saying
Trouble Girl gives us the flawed and fierce truth few of us want to speak, but we all need and fear.
Fast-paced, energetic… Ava’s voice, attitude, quirky humour, and angst drive the emotional arc… I could not help but wonder after a stirring passage whether I am caught up in an intimate tell-all or a radical new genre.
I think editors sometimes don’t want to be mentioned in a book’s acknowledgements because they don’t want to be associated with the book! Maybe because the book was so badly written that all they could do was make it grammatically correct and spelled write. However, I would be grateful for a mention in your book, which was a pleasure to work on and the writing was lovely.