Billie Girl

Southern Gothic, dark humor, and human sexuality, wrapped in the theme of mercy killing: Billie Girl, b. 1900

"Honestly strange and strangely honest.... Remarkably compelling and powerful. Weaver's authenticity of characters, situations, and by-gone 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 Last Call and The Girl from Charnelle

"Darkly comic, deeply poignant.... Billie Girl is the adventurer through a long, strange trip that is life itself-full of twists and turns of identity, characters high and low, and ultimately, love sought by the hardest, even when it entails the greatest sacrifices."

-Roy Hoffman, author of Almost Family and Chicken Dreaming Corn

This fall, Leapfrog Press adds to its LeapLit line with Billie Girl, the powerful novel by Vickie Weaver, winner of the 2009 Leapfrog Fiction Contest (Leapfrog Press, September 2010, $14.95). Abandoned as an infant because of her incessant crying, and left hanging from a tree in a makeshift sling, Billie Girl is rescued by a passing couple, then turned over to a homeless boy who sells her for $5 to the two women who raise her-women who are actually brothers. Billie Girl's life, a gender-bending puzzle filled with dark humor and lessons on killing out of love, is a series of pivotal encounters with strangers who struggle along with what they are given: her two "mothers," a bigamist husband, a long-lost daughter named after a car, a platonic second husband who loved Billie's 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.

--A Note to School Librarians--

This book contains some adult sexual content (but not violence) and is unlikely to be appropriate for high school libraries or literature classes.

--A Note to Romance/Chick-Lit Readers--

This is not a romance novel. It is literary fiction, not mainstream women's, chick-lit, or any other genre.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vickie Weaver, who attended college in her mid-40s, settled into the writing life after earning an MFA from Spalding University in Louisville, Ky. Her short stories have appeared in many literary journals, and one was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006; her unpublished collection Below the Heart was a semifinalist in the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction in 2008. Ms. Weaver teaches at Indiana University East.

BILLIE GIRL • Vickie Weaver

240 pages • ISBN: 978-1-935248-12-5 • Trade paperback, $14.95

September 2010 • A LeapLit Book

Leapfrog Literature

Published by Leapfrog Press LLC

www.leapfrogpress.com

Distributed to the trade by

Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

www.cbsd.com