In her debut novel, the aptly-named Stephanie Emily Dickinson (who also reminds me of a female Tennessee Williams) gives us Angelique, a sort of hitch-hiking Lolita, and somehow makes her heart break in the reader’s chest. Half Girl is 100% thrilling, harrowing, beautiful, and unforgettable.

Jennifer Belle, author of Going Down and High Maintenance

Stephanie Dickinson’s novel, Half Girl, pulls you under at once, and when you come up for air, you are astounded to be in the same room where you began. Each sentence is a surprise—a trip in the mind of a sharply sensual and adventurous girl who is leaving home and immediately finding danger in cold, lonely places. You read in fear of what might happen to her, but also with a blind faith in her hopeful determination.

Meredith Sue Willis, author of In the Mountains of America, Space Apart, Higher Ground, and Only Great Changes

Incisive and insightful doesn’t begin to describe the writing of Stephanie Dickinson. She has lived her work and enables her work to live in us. I don’t hesitate to say that long after many other writers have faded, Stephanie Emily Dickinson will be right there. Her namesake would be proud.

Chocolate Waters, Charting New Waters, Take Me Like a Photograph, a pioneer in the art of performance poetry, NEA fellow

MORE REVIEWS OF HALF GIRL >>>

Corn Goddess speaks to the sacred teenage time when a body blossoms and is maimed, about prairie and ramshackle farms and desolate cow lanes, the dirt’s remembering of recluses and long ago animal sex, about mothers, those angry and strong Midwestern women who feed their daughters the bone soup of self-hatred, and fathers who hunt the silver foxes running through farm girls’ imaginations. Corn Goddess describes the struggle to escape the seduction of gunnysacks and summer afternoons spent lying on cut hay after the balers have been through, of green corn and mystery growing in every direction, a fecund claustrophobia, and the darkness encountered once the wider world is found.

In this debut collection of short stories told in lush, humid prose the protagonists are all young women, many of them teens, trying to survive the extreme situation. There is Hatchet, accused by her Lakota brethren of being an FBI informer; Trout, a fundamentalist Christian with four children and another on the way; Kimchee, a Korean orphan; and Jasmina, imported from the Balkans for the sex trade. In “Fire Maidens, ’57,” Monarch helps her father sick from the radioactive “death dust” kill himself. This is the above ground atomic bomb testing Nevada of the 1950s. “A Lynching in Stereoscope” is told in two first person accounts.

Ciz and Jelly weave an interlocking narrative of a woman lynched in 1930s Arkansas and a home health aide who discovers that the elderly brother and sister she’s caring for did more than witness the event as children. In the title story “Road of Five Churches,” two grifters, a mother and daughter who wander the south selling bogus vacuum sweepers, are revealed to be a grown missing toddler and the woman who abducted her. “Amiga Mom from Planet Iraq” tells the homecoming of Sgt. Bethany Telecky, a disabled Iraq War Veteran, whose job was detonating bombs in a country wanting to “blow itself up into smaller and smaller bits of dirt and dust.” She loses her left arm and part of her face in an IED explosion. An intense, lively read, often darkly humorous, these stories never fail to lyrically entertain.