Young Adult Literature; Family Drama
Young Adult Literature
This one's pretty obvious: the main character is a teenager, all her friends (except her boss at the pizza place) are teenagers, and the book was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young Adult Literature. It deals with situations in which primarily teens tend to find themselves, like girls getting a bad reputation for having sex while boys tell all the gory details and become studs. (If you know any adults in these situations, they need to find better adults to hang out with.)
Family Drama
And we do mean drama—Story of a Girl is all about family dysfunction and relationships gone seriously awry. There's the drama of Deanna and her dad not speaking post-Tommy; the drama of the enabling mom who puts on a happy face but is, in fact, miserable; and, last but not least, the serious drama of a son who's brought his baby mama home and moved into the basement. If that's not quite enough drama for you, the baby mama and the son's dad fight constantly.
Deanna's so determined to avoid the emotional baggage of her family that she hangs around outside the house after she gets home from work, waiting for her parents to go to bed so she can sneak in.
Tone: 99 Shades of Bleak
You'd be hard-pressed to find a young adult lit heroine with a crummier home life than Deanna, except maybe those Ellen Hopkins characters who are always doing meth or being molested by their dads (or both). Because Deanna's such a compelling narrator, after a while you start to feel like you're right there in her life with her. Every time she mentions the green shag carpet and pink kitchen, they seem a little more real, and you can almost smell the mustiness of the basement.
By taking us back into Deanna's house over and over, Zarr illustrates a life of never-ending bleakness, like the one she sees her mother living: "Mom would be left behind […] alone with Dad for the rest of their lives, the house staying exactly the same (down to the last detail), shabby and worn-out, all the stains and holes and leaks showing, green shag carpet forever" (3.54). Deanna's hopelessness is pervasive, to the point that you may start feeling a little hopeless too.