Billie Girl. Vickie Weaver

"Honestly strange and strangely honest. . . . Remarkably compelling and powerful. Weaver's authenticity of characters, situations, and bygone eras emanates from sheer originality of style. This amazing novel is a stellar achievement—gritty, funny, fresh, and bold. It will make your eyes bug out and your pulse race. And how it shines, shines with humanity!"—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife"Southern Gothic to the core, suffused with a humor as dark as the bottom of a Georgia well. . . .Weaver has stepped forward for the benefit of anyone who reads American fiction."—Kirby Gann, author of Our Napoleon in Rags"Savagely funny, wildly ambitious. . . . A bawdy, brutal, and beautiful meditation on identity, sex, and mercy. Weaver has a fiercely distinctive vision."—K.L. Cook, author of The Girl from Charnelle"Darkly comic, deeply poignant. . . . Billie Girl is the adventurer through a long, strange trip that is life itself."—Roy Hoffman, author of Chicken Dreaming CornAbandoned as in infant because of her incessant crying, Billie Girl is raised by two women who are brothers. Her life, a gender-bending puzzle filled with dark humor, is a series of encounters with strangers who struggle along with what they are given: a bigamist husband, a long-lost daughter named after a car, a lesbian preacher's wife, a platonic second husband who loved her adoptive father. Twin themes of sexuality and euthanasia run throughout. In a journey from hard-dirt Georgia farm to end-of-life nursing home, Billie Girl comes to understand the mercy of killing.