Sweetgirl

“Travis Mulhauser hits it out of the park in his first novel. . . . overwhelming triumph . . .”

“People will reveal themselves to you, Percy. . . . In single moments they will show you what they are. . . .”

Life is never easy when one is poor, make no mistake. Percy James, the 16-year-old protagonist of Travis Mulhauser’s debut novel, Sweetgirl, learned this at her mother’s knee. She also learned about drug abuse, betrayal, and loneliness. Some people are broken by the despair of such a life; some develop souls of flint. Maybe that’s an explanation for why Percy goes out into a blizzard to look for her tweaker mother, Carletta.

In the process of her search, she discovers a tiny, freezing baby in an upstairs room of a drug dealer’s house. Despite the danger, Percy makes a choice to save the one person she can help and in the process sets off a series of events by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.

Travis Mulhauser hits it out of the park in his first novel. Percy is a strong, stubborn girl, well able to take care of herself. She’s bright and funny and wise beyond her years. With that kind of setup, it would have been easy for Mulhauser to make her a wisecracking teen, a can-do kid. The story would have been just as exciting.

What Mulhauser has done with Percy, though, is far more difficult: He’s made her human. She sees the world with warmth and humor, but it’s clear she’s lived in a “laugh, or you’ll drown in your own tears” far too long. “The only thing that surprised me was my own surprise . . . I still felt all gut-punched and woozy, like it was the first time she forgot to pick me up from school,” she thinks when she’s informed that her mother is off on another bender. Mulhauser uses that first page revelation to set up a backstory for his main character, and in the process lets the reader know that Percy is not yet hardened, despite her past. She’s mature by necessity, not nature, and she’s bone tired already.

Nowhere is it clearer that Percy is still a child than when she takes baby Jenna and heads for the shack of Portis Dale, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, “the closest thing (Percy) had to a father.” Mulhauser’s dialogue shines when Percy and Portis are together. They have a quick back and forth patter that is strongly reminiscent of the relationship between Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn in Charles Portis’ True Grit.

Portis is a rough man but devoted to Percy. After his initial shock at seeing Percy and an infant at his doorstep, he’s immediately on board to do whatever needs to be done. “[I]t’s my job to help you,” he tells Percy and when questioned why says, “Because. We were almost family once.” Even after it’s clear that getting the baby to a hospital isn’t going to be as easy as Percy expected, his loyalty is clear.

Sweetgirl tells a story that’s been told time and again, notably in Winter’s Bone, to which it will inevitably be compared. Mulhauser goes beyond that basic story of the struggle of have-nots in a hard world in his creation of Shelton Potter. Again, it would have been far easier to have Cutler, Michigan’s local meth dealer, be a villain out of central casting, to make him a stone cold, unrepentant killer.

What Mulhauser has done is superior: While never losing sight of Potter’s crimes, Mulhauser has given him three dimensions. He is a drug dealer, has been imprisoned for murder, is perfectly willing to shoot someone he suspects of having robbed him . . . but he loves his dog, his girlfriend, and baby Jenna.

We’re presented with a young man who is just as much a victim of his circumstances and background as are Percy and Portis. As ridiculous as it sounds, Sheldon provides a large amount of comic relief as he stumbles through the story, high, but still trying to do the right thing by finding the baby he thinks has been stolen. It’s a forceful reminder that characters are all heroes of their own stories. Despite better judgment, he evokes sympathy. “. . . so few had ever glimpsed the deepest and most beautiful intentions of [my] heart,” he muses, and a reader is inclined to perhaps grudgingly agree.

Sweetgirl has a couple of missteps. The last few chapters are less focused; they seem added on to the main narrative, which feels finished at the end of chapter 18. Mulhauser’s editors might have looked again at the baby blanket side story, as well. As insignificant as it seems, the blanket changing from twin sized, to baby sized, to a size that would fit in a standard glove box in a car was distracting.

These are tiny issues, though, next to the overwhelming triumph that is Sweetgirl. Mulhauser is a writer to watch (probably on the movie screen, because this book is a natural for that medium). One of the best of the new year’s releases.