Here’s a tip for you before you crack open Travis Mulhauser’s SWEETGIRL: make sure you’re snuggled into a comfortable chair with lots of pillows and blankets, preferably with a nice steaming mug of tea or hot cocoa at your side. Why, you ask? Well, two reasons, really: First, Mulhauser’s harrowing descriptions of a blizzard in the north woods are bound to make you chilly; second, you’re going to want to be comfortable because this book is so hard to put down.

Ever since her older sister Starr escaped from Cutler County in northern Michigan, moving west to Portland with her husband and their brand-new baby, Percy James has tried really hard to hold things together at home. She was able to keep her mom, Carletta, sober for a while, but now Carletta has taken up with the county’s most notorious meth dealer once again. Percy has dropped out of school to support the family, all while trying to keep her mom alive and prevent Starr from knowing what’s gone wrong back home.

"Combining brutal social realism, a family drama and lyrical descriptions of the natural world, this is a stellar debut novel, one that will introduce many to an unfamiliar setting and a new writer to watch."

Carletta’s latest bender coincides with one of the worst blizzards anyone in Cutler County can remember, which is saying something in a land of massive lake-effect snowfalls. When Percy ventures to Shelton Potter’s farmhouse in search of her vanished mother, there’s no sign of Carletta besides her abandoned car. Instead, she finds Shelton and another woman passed out cold --- and a beautiful baby named Jenna abandoned in a bassinet in front of an open window. Jenna is wearing a filthy diaper, and is starving and shivering from the cold. Percy doesn’t hesitate. Even as the wind howls and the snow blows, she takes Jenna, some diapers and formula, and hits the road. She wants to give the baby a chance --- even a small one --- at a life better than the one she was born into.

But when Shelton comes down off his high, he starts to look for Jenna, too, enlisting some of his goons with the promise of a hefty cash reward. Soon the dangers posed by the natural world are compounded by man-made threats, as Percy and her mom’s old friend Portis put their lives at risk to save Jenna’s.

Mulhauser, who grew up in northern Michigan and also set a previous short fiction collection in Cutler County, effectively depicts the social and physical complexities of this remote area. Percy marvels at how the landscape can be so beautiful even when the realities of life and death that play out against it are often bleak and ugly. She contrasts the comfortable lifestyles of the tourists from Chicago and Milwaukee who come up to the picturesque small town for fudge and Christmas decorations with the hopeless existences of the drunks and addicts who live there year-round.

SWEETGIRL is suspenseful. Its ambience and journey narrative, not to mention its themes about family ties, might remind some of the novel (and eventual movie) WINTER’S BONE. But it’s also funny, its dry and unexpected humor often sneaking up on readers unawares. Combining brutal social realism, a family drama and lyrical descriptions of the natural world, this is a stellar debut novel, one that will introduce many to an unfamiliar setting and a new writer to watch.