GODS WITH A LITTLE G — tupelo hassman

Chicago Review of Books, The Best New Books of August 2019

Hassman’s writing vibrates with honesty, hilarity, and twists of language that sparkle with gusto. Very few books have the ricochet verve that this novel does. It is special, and amidst the hardship, the beer cans, and the rebellion, there is great effervescent hope, which keeps us all going. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editors’ Picks (Best of the Month)

Sweet and sour, magical yet grounded in reality: gods with a little g is one special coming-of-age tale. Take note, HBO: This would be perfect prestige TV fodder. —Refinery29, Put These New Books on Your TBR List & Stat

"Irreverent, wise, heartbreaking, and heart-mending, this is about nothing less than the everyday challenges of love, belief, and existence. In Hassman's dazzlingly original style, sweet-sour, wicked-tender Helen's entrancing narration casts a remarkable spell. Girlchild won an Alex Award, and this novel is no less likely to inspire and reward literary-minded teens, especially aspiring writers."

—Laura Albert, author of JT LeRoy’s Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

“Flannery O’Connor once said that sooner or later she’d have to write about the religious consciousness without a religion. With this novel, Tupelo Hassman picks up and runs where O’Connor left off, and I am grateful to her for writing fiction that is mystical and reckless and hopefully irreverent, and that has at least (at least!) five lines of poetry on every page. This is very much the Real Thing.”

—Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl and Frances and Bernard

"Tupelo Hassman has written a sacrament for girls growing up as we did, a liturgy for their irreverent hilarious resilient souls, a stylistically sly and beautiful book, a wild ride of a novel set in a California everyone should know."

—Susan Straight, Take One Candle Light a Room, Highwire Moon, and Between Heaven and Here

“This is a story to read when you are starving to connect, a book to fall into with your whole heart, to cry and laugh, and say hell yeah. I can't wait for readers to meet Helen, a cool kid who pushes right through the page in every form her words take, from letters to God to posters on light poles, irresistibly funny, entirely lovable. When a young person's faith is shattered by grief, mending the soul is delicate work. Tupelo Hassman has mastered this fragile form, and the sharp fragments of Helen's story come together like shards, reforming her into a glittering new shape in a story that is authentic in every way. This novel will steal your heart. If you think you're too cynical to cry over a girl's first love, here is the story to blow up your apathy.”

—Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine, How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky, and Everybody’s Baby

"This book is a revelation. And it’s so very intoxicating to read. It got me drunker on its language’s wild, thorny beauty and the paper flowers of its love than even the Dickheads could get by chugging beers hanging upside-down, or needling prophecies into one another’s skins. I’m more than a little in love with Gods with a Little g, and with Helen, Dickhead Queen, Rosary Breakout Allstar, daughter, heroine, best friend. I wish she were my best friend. Hassman is a genius, and here she has written yet another book of my dreams: wildly inventive, brackishly funny, and, at times, devastating. But always absolutely true, and huge-hearted in its telling. Once I began reading it, I truly couldn’t stop. It’s guileless and gorgeous. It’s one of the loveliest things I’ve ever read. And it only changed the way I think about life, fiction, and what’s possible. Only all that."

—Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange

"gods with a little g is sharp, witty, endlessly surprising, darkly comic, and bighearted to boot. The characters Tupelo Hassman has created will burrow under your skin like the illegal tattoo our narrator Helen gets in the tire yard: they will stay with you for a long time after. Just marvelous."

—Annie Hartnett, Rabbit Cake

Writer's Digest - Interview

—Annie Bostrom, Booklist (starred review)

—Kirkus (starred review)

—Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock and The Vanishers

—Zulema Renee Summerfield, Every Other Weekend

—Willie Vlautin, Lean on Pete, Northline, and The Motel Life