Critical Praise

"Reading Andrea Portes makes you feel like your elbows are damp from having been resting in beer-bottle condensation rings on a wobbly table in the kind of dive bar where sooner or later - and bet on sooner - somebody's going to have a pool cue broken over his head, and the guy wielding the cue is going to know enough to swing it from the narrow end because it's not the first time for him or, for that matter, the guy getting clocked… Portes is the woman sitting at the table with you - young, a little drunk and too smart by three-fourths. She's reeling off a real spellbinder about a few horrific days in her grimy-blue-collar upbringing in a rural Nebraska so sere and bleak and emotionally sandblasted that it'd make an off-the-shelf trailer park look like Rancho Santa Fe. Actually it's not Portes, but Luli McMullen, the narrator of Portes' knockout - as in a right cross to the jaw - debut novel 'Hick'."

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“[A] chilling debut.”

—Publishers Weekly

"'Hick' is a bracing drama, a study in tenacity against the gnarled teeth of domestic storms."

—Los Angeles Times

“For everyone whose childhood wasn't perfect; for everyone whose parents disappointed; for everyone whose adolescent dreams were changed or abandoned; for everyone, there's Hick by Andrea Portes. Abandoned by her parents, 13 year-old Luli decides to hitch hike to Las Vegas in search of a sugar daddy. What she finds isn't as sweet as she's imagined.”

—Keri Holmes, The Kaleidoscope Bookstore

“There probably was a time in the U.S. when parents read books to their kids at night; a time when people really cared about their neighbors and acted appropriately. Luli is America gone wrong personified. Hick is the coming of age novel for our twisted times.”

—Jeffrey A. Tipton, author of Surviving the City