The Blue Girl
Coffee House Press / 978-1566893992 / Paperback $15.95
IN THIS SMALL lakeside town, mothers bake their secrets into moon pies they feed to a silent blue girl. Their daughters have secrets too—that they can’t sleep, that they might sleep with a neighbor boy, that they know more than they let on. But when the daughters find the blue girl, everyone’s carefully held silences shake loose.
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Reviews
“If you could feed someone your secrets, would you? Not in the metaphorical I-can’t-handle-this-alone-or-I’ll-burst, but literally. What if you could bake your secrets into moon pies and feed them to a girl who doesn’t really exist? Part fantasy, but totally fantastical, this is a book that will give your sweet tooth a taste of the rottenness that exists in all of this, and a taste of the dark secrets unsaid, especially those between mothers and daughters.” —Kaylen Ralph
“Laurie Foos is known for her slightly surreal fiction—that might be an understatement; after all, her last novel centered on a woman who loses her uterus in a shopping mall. In her sixth novel, The Blue Girl, Irene, the mother of a teenaged daughter and 8-year-old son, begins baking her secrets into moon pies for a mysterious blue girl to consume. But although the premise is fantastical, Foos grounds it in the relationships (and secrets) within families, especially between mothers and daughters—including Irene and her daughter, Audrey.” —BookPage
“Reading Laurie Foos’ The Blue Girl is like peering into someone else’s dream. There is a slowness to the story that makes it feel surreal, like wading through water.” —Nomadic Press
“The manifold neuroses that haunt these families pressurize the novel, and reading it can feel claustrophobic — but poetic all the same […] The prose is clean, exacting and approachable, which makes the arrangement of the book — and the swirling vortex of complicated psychologies — even more impressive and heartbreaking.” —StarTribune
“Foos’s level of control over her prose is masterful; these six different narrators’ recalling of often the same event never feels redundant—it is necessary information that is crucial in understanding the whole of the story. The pace of The Blue Girl zooms like a roller coaster, and when it’s mixed with Foos’s talent for both subtle and fantastical imagery, the novel really feels like an unpredictable and emotional thrill ride.” —NewPages.com