Two estranged twin sisters, Hard Girls, hunt for their elusive mother—and face down the darkness they tried to escape.
In This Spotlight On Hard Girls
About Hard Girls
Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law,) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her past: her mercurial, absent mother, her parents’ secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life.
When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she’s made for the one that has been impossible to escape.
Set in both the Pool family’s past and their present, and melding elements of a chase novel, an espionage thriller, and domestic suspense, Hard Girls is an utterly distinctive pastiche—propulsive, mysterious, cracked, intelligent, and unexpected at every turn.
ISBN-13: 9780316550581
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication date: 02/20/2024
Source: Publisher
Praise for Hard Girls
“We build our world from the materials available, those given and allowed us. In Hard Girls, J. Robert Lennon has a brilliant, seemingly effortless way of sorting through the lumber, bent nails, staples, glue, and salvage that make up our lives.”—James Sallis, author of Drive and Sarah Jane
“Hard Girls is a rollicking read, an immersive, funny, consequential family story that is also a thriller. Lennon is a master of plot and suspense, but he’s also wonderful at creating indelible characters, particularly the wild twins at the heart of this story. Hard Girls deftly evokes complex family dynamics: the tense innocence and precocity of adolescence as well as the poignant, hard reckoning of parenthood.”—Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
“J. Robert Lennon’s Hard Girls is a mother-daughter thriller unlike any I’ve ever read. It’s a simple-enough premise—two sisters set off to track down their long-lost mother—but the narrative twists and turns are as distinctive and surprising as the relationships that propel them. Each and every character is exquisitely rendered here, and sisters Jane and Lila Pool are nothing less than utterly captivating: they are at once brilliant and vulnerable, tender and vicious. I fell head over heels in love with them both—and I know readers will too.”—Elizabeth Little, author of Dear Daughter and Pretty as a Picture
“Hard Girls excels as a racing, twisty crime novel about the things we do to survive and how the people we love most surprise us, challenge us, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, save us. Jane’s desire to be the mother her mother never was will pull at your heartstrings and the inventive plot will keep you glued to the page. Lennon reminds us there’s no escaping the past until we look it square in the eye. A bold and adventurous novel.”—Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke
About J. Robert Lennon, Author of Hard Girls
J. Robert Lennon is the author of nine novels, including Hard Girls, Mailman, Castle, Familiar, Broken River, and Subdivision, and two story collections, Pieces For The Left Hand and See You in Paradise. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Playboy, Granta, The Paris Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere, and his criticism in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The Nation, and The London Review of Books. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana. He lives in Ithaca, New York and teaches writing at Cornell University.
You can find and follow J. Robert Lennon on his website, and on his Substack newsletter Literambivalence.
Titles by J. Robert Lennon
Other LitStack Resources
Be sure and check out other LitStack Spotlights that shine a light on books we think you should read.
As a Bookshop, BAM, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Lumas affiliate, LitStack may earn a commission at no cost to you when you purchase products through our affiliate links.
