The Girl

The Girl is a 1986 young adult novel by Robbie Branscum centered on a female child, referred to only as “the girl,” and her four siblings who, abandoned by their mother after their father died, go to live with their sharecropper grandparents.

The novel begins during “just another dog-days August summer in Arkansas” at the beginning of tomato-harvesting season. The girl is eleven years old, shy and conscious of her body undergoing puberty. Her relations with her grandmother are strained: “Grandma whipped the girl a lot anyhow, not so much for sinning as because the girl looked so much like her mother.” However, Grandma was also “glad to have the money the welfare paid them each month,” money she spends on her own son Les, who regularly tries to get his niece “to lie with him in the woods so he could feel her all over.” Grandpa does not work, claiming that it causes him heart attacks.

The girl’s siblings include brother Gene (age fourteen), who “had done a man’s work since the age of nine,” brother Lee (twelve), sister Dale (eight), and brother Hersh (four), and some of the book’s chapters are told from the perspective of Gene and Lee. Although she can read, the girl speaks only when she is talking to Gene and Lee, and everyone else in the community thinks she must be mentally challenged, especially because she has the habit of following random people home after church. Gene tries to keep an eye on Uncle Les, knowing of his criminal interest in the girl, and regularly takes food to Les’s fifteen-year-old, pregnant wife, Flo, who is despised by Grandma’s family and largely ignored by Les.

The only reprieve for the girl is taking care of Granny, her great-grandmother, who spends part of the year with them and tells the girl stories about her own long life. Granny’s death, therefore, sends the girl into a depression. When Grandma tries to deny the girl dinner after a hard day’s work, Gene finally stands up to her. The next day, he finds Uncle Les attempting to rape the girl at a nearby spring and beats the man, telling him to leave the area or he will inform the whole family of what happened. The book ends with Flo writing to her parents to take her back home and a letter arriving from the children’s mother, saying that she will be returning to collect them. However, when the children’s mother returns, she tells them that she remarried and has two new children. She does not take them when she leaves. As their mother drives away, the girl cries for the first time in the story.

The American Library Association named The Girl a Best Book for Young Adults in 1986 and a Recommended Book for Reluctant YA Readers in 1987. Publishers Weekly described the book as “a gripping, highly unusual story of the unquenchable human spirit,” while School Library Journal called it “the poignant story of human endurance, love, and hope in a seemingly hopeless setting.”

For additional information:
Branscum, Robbie. The Girl. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas