Tupelo Hassman's Debut Novel, "Girlchild" It takes real talent to make something beautiful out of a trailer park. "Girlchild," Tupelo Hassman's lacerating debut novel, is the story of Rory Dawn Hendrix, a young girl growing up in the Calle, a cluster of mobile homes on a plot of dust outside Reno, Nev. Ms. Hassman is such a poised storyteller that her prose practically struts. Her words are as elegant as they are fierce. A voice as fresh as hers is so rare that at times I caught myself cheering, and it wasn't necessarily for the kid. Here is Rory Dawn introducing us to the folks of the Calle: "I can still recognize someone from my neighborhood by their teeth. Or lack of them. And whenever I do, I call these people family. I know immediately that I can trust them with my dog but not with the car keys and not to remember what time, exactly, they're coming back for their kids. Her mother, Johanna, she tells us, lost most of her teeth by the time she was 15. No matter how she looked otherwise, tall and long-legged, long brown hair, pale skin that held its flush, it was this something vulnerable about the mouth and eyes too that kept men coming back to her. The men would likely say this was due to her willingness to welcome them back, and Mama may have been an easy lay, but I'm cool with that because any easy lay will tell you, making it look easy is a lot of work. The dentures she bought herself when she was 25 didn't change things. In her head, she never stopped being a rotten-mouthed girl. I don't know about you, but I'd go anywhere with this writer. Neither Ms. Hassman nor her heroine ventures very far. After all, if a trailer park like the Calle weren't confining, no one would stay. There ends up being not that much in the way of plot. But plot, schmot: The action is in the language and who this girl is. Not everything here works. A central theme is Rory Dawn's reliance on the Girl Scout handbook for guidance. It's an overly cute writerly device. When Rory Dawn says she likes the promises it makes about duty and honor, we're conscious of Ms. Hassman's hand's pulling the meaning lever. But she builds up enough literary capital that after you account for any weakness, she's still flush. The tension revolves around a single, pressing question: How will Rory Dawn make it out of the Calle? Her mother didn't get much of a chance. Johanna escaped her abusive father only to find she had tunneled into another prison; she had her first baby just after her 16th birthday. In short order she had three more, a divorce and a welfare file. Then came Rory Dawn. When Johanna's not bartending at the Truck Stop, she's drinking down her tip jar. If she ever expected anything good to happen in her life, she no longer does. "You can't just give death your number and expect him not to call," Rory Dawn says. Just like anyone else she ever flirted with, Mama knows he'll be back. Rory Dawn's grandmother, Shirley Rose, spent her life on the slots in town. So there's not a role model in the bunch. "The only person we know going to college is Alex on "Family Ties," " Rory Dawn says, with her characteristic light touch. Most of the book takes place in the 1980s. But Rory Dawn's mother and grandmother know enough to believe in their girl. "Someone's got to make it," her grandmother tells her, "and it has to be you." She excels at school. Bar graphs reflecting her test scores grow to the top of the page. When she is 10, she wins the county spelling bee, which makes her mother proud but baffled. "Mama acts like I don't belong to her anymore," she says. And that's just fine. Because I never feel, I never ever feel, like Mama belongs to me. At the final round of the statewide competition, she locks on her mom in the audience, out of place among the sweater sets. Rory Dawn knows how to spell the word but can't bring herself to do it. If success means leaving her mother behind, she's not ready yet. "Wrong is my ticket home," she says, "and I'm cashing it in." Ms. Hassman takes a paint-by-numbers approach to telling her story: Chapters are short bursts of color, self-contained vignettes about life in the Calle. A paragraph-long chapter about how quickly a mobile home can burn ("in the space of a "Brought to you by" or "Tonight at 11" ") is followed by an excerpt from Johanna Hendrix's welfare file. The social worker, Rory Dawn says, "kept the record of what my family deserved and what we didn't." The abrupt turns can be jarring, but the narrative never lacks for energy. The portrait that emerges is horrific. While her mother works, Rory Dawn is left with the Hardware Man. When she has to use the bathroom, the hardware man insists on helping. Then, Ms. Hassman writes, he turns the lights out. Rory Dawn is 6 at the time. Ms. Hassman can't bring herself to fill in all the details; she ends up redacting most of what happens in the bathroom. If at first this seems as if she were chickening out, the multiple pages of blackened-out lines end up delivering a punch to the gut. She makes plenty clear: "The Calle is a kind of war zone, the enemy is all around us, the enemy is us." She goes on, "Just when you think you're going to get some R&R, there's another emergency on the horizon, and to top it all off, the food is terrible." Certainly the odds are against Rory Dawn. Still, I couldn't resist going all in for her. Susannah Meadows writes the Newly Released column for The Times.