I grew up in the suburbs of Long Island, in New York. I've lived all over America but these days I live and teach in England. I'm a published academic now writing fiction (and still a lot of critical stuff). I like to write novels featuring hard-boiled women. I also love language, sometimes to distraction.
For a full bio and other information on Meredith Miller please check out her website here.
Title: Little Wrecks
Genre: YA Fiction
Author: Meredith Miller
Publisher: HarperTeen
Publication: June 13th 2017
Cover Rating: 4/5
If I had to sum up Little Wrecks up in one word, that one world would be: CRAZY. This book takes you on one hell of a ride with these girls and their messed up lives and their fight to be free of this horrible town they are from. If you liked We Were Liars, Wink, Poppy, Midnight or The Careful Undressing of Love then you would absolutely love this book.
The book is told from the perspectives of three female friends. Ruth, Magda and Isabel are best friends, or they were before this book started. Throughout the book you watch as these three whimsical. mysterious, weird girls drift apart from one another but at the same time they are finding out who they are or who they don't want to be. The girls make a TON of bad decisions and each one has a difficult home life, in their opinion anyways, so they want to find a way to get the hell out of dodge, or, in this case, Highbone, Long Island.
Ruth is ROUGH. She is very fun to read about but she is also a scary chick. She doesn't know who her dad is and feels like her mother is stupid because she keeps having these horrible boyfriends. I liked Magda the best. She loves to tinker and build things but she is also very strong. Her mother is gone and she has pretty much raised her little brother and she doesn't act like he is a burden to her.
After reading Little Wrecks I can say that I am glad I wasn't alive in the 70's and 80's. The crap the author describes the guys doing to girls makes me sick. I would put someone in the hospital if they ever tried any of that crap with me. There was just so much violence both bodily and sexual. All the people in this book seemed screwed up in one way or another.
In the end, nothing really turned out entirely as the girls planned and I think they were foolish for pretty much the entirety of the book. The girls most definitely earn the title Little Wrecks. Magda still didn't deserve what happened in the end. The one thing she loved in this world was taken from her by a person who took so much from her already. It was fricken sad.
Overall, I gave the book 4/5 stars.
1) Did you always want to be an author?
Yes! I wrote my first poem at four years old. Actually, I couldn't write then so I dictated it to my sister Peggy and she wrote it down for me. I folded it up and put it safely in a little toy mailbox I had. My parents were away at a conference and when they got home they acted very impressed. I think that positive reinforcement early on set me on the road! When I was twelve I mapped out my first novel, but I didn't finish one until I was nearly 40. In between I was a performance poet and an academic, so I've always been writing.
2) Are you currently working on any new books?
Oh, yes! I am just finishing my second novel for the folks at HarperTeen. It's called How We Learned to Lie and it will be out in June 2018. The novel is set in the same world as Little Wrecks, but a year on (winter 1979 and through 1980). It's a more straightforward YA in terms of the way the story is told, but still pretty dark and gruesome! I have also recently finished an adult historical novel, Whiteness and am embarking on an atmospheric adult gothic called Fall River. After that, I hope to write a third novel for Harper, set in Manhattan circa 1983 and starring a hard-boiled detective who happens to be a teenage girl!
3) What was your inspiration for Little Wrecks?
I wanted to write a novel about the time and place in which I grew up, because there were things about that moment in history that I wanted to talk to younger women about. We'd been told there was a sexual revolution, that now there was feminism and we could be whatever we wanted to be, that what we wanted mattered, that we could do anything we put our minds to. The thing was, the world hadn't really caught up with that. When we stepped out of our houses, we were in a very dangerous place. The kinds of danger we were in were not talked about or recognised. Once I started writing about all that, everything else about that time and place came flooding back and I started writing about the men who had come back from Vietnam and the way we thought about things, the books we read (so different from the kinds of things young women read now) and everything our girlhood friendships meant to us.
4) If you had to pitch Little Wrecks to a potential reader what would you tell them?
This book is made of blood and tears and the shattered dreams of young women. It might scare you. It might make you very sad, but it is also a book about beauty and survival. It is entirely fictional, but every word of it is the truth. Whoever you are, if you are a young woman I wrote it for you.
5) Do you read YA books? If so, what is your favorite one?
I recently read Laura Ruby's Bone Gap and it made me very jealous! I wish I'd written it! If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend. I love southern gothic novels by Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms), Richard Wright (I'm thinking of Black Boy which is actually a memoir) and Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and others). These books all have child protagonists. I think if they were published now they'd be sold as YA, but that might change them, too. Mostly, I read a lot of stuff that was published before 1900! If you are a person who loves reading and wants to stretch yourself, try anything by Frances Burney. All of her books feature teenage heroines and they're all so good!
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