Winner of the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize
"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 Corn
Abandoned 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.
