Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781421455648 Academic Inspection Copy

Big Girls

Stories
Description
Author
Biography
Table of
Contents
Sales
Points
Google
Preview
Tender, unsparing stories about bodies, longing, and the haphazard, messy business of becoming. Big Girls is a luminous collection of short stories that examine what it means to move through the world in a body that feels scrutinized, misunderstood, or out of place. With a voice that is both sharp and tender, Janet Thielke writes about girls and women navigating adolescence, family life, desire, and loss, capturing the quiet moments when self-awareness begins to harden into identity. These stories follow characters who are observant, self-conscious, and deeply human. In the title story, a teenage girl and her emotionally volatile aunt grapple with body image and bullying from opposite sides of life experience. Elsewhere, a science teacher in a conservative town defends evolution while caring for her disabled son, and a hypothetical game of life and death spirals into conflict over loyalty, love, and emotional vulnerability. Thielke allows her characters to be contradictory: funny and wounded, defensive and generous, hopeful even when they are hurting. Bodies are central to these stories as living vessels carrying memory, shame, pleasure, and longing. Ordinary settings become emotionally charged, and seemingly small encounters leave lasting scars. Big Girls explores what it means to be watched, to grapple with the outgrown narratives of the past, and to imagine a future self who might finally feel at home. This is a collection that pays close attention to people often overlooked-and finds meaning in the act of noticing.
Janet Thielke is a writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals and was recognized as a "Distinguished Story" in Best American Short Stories 2020. She is the author of the middle-grade novel Twelfth (published as Janet Key).
Contents But It Moves Alpha Whiskey Alpha Yankee The Tattooed Lady Eggs Life Is Hard and Unfair: Or, A Semester Breakdown Men Watch the Women and the Women Watch the Women Along for the Ride Have You Seen Me? Pedro Val The Bullet Game Frantic Hearts This Time Big Girls Acknowledgments
Tender, unsparing stories about bodies, longing, and the haphazard, messy business of becoming.
Google Preview content