🌊 The Girls Who Grew Big Review ⭐⭐☆☆☆ | Teen Motherhood, Hurricanes, and Plot Holes Big Enough to Swallow Florida
📚 Book Info
Title: The Girls Who Grew Big
Author: Leila Mottley
Genre: Contemporary Fiction / Literary Fiction
Rating: ⭐⭐☆☆☆ (2 stars)
⚠️ Trigger Warnings
Teen pregnancy
Child neglect/endangerment
Emotional abuse
Racism
Sexual assault/molestation
Pregnancy termination
Toxic relationships
Hurricane/disaster scenes
Medical trauma involving children
Homophobia
Substance use
Strong language
🚨 SPOILER WARNING 🚨
This review contains FULL spoilers, including the ending, relationship reveals, pregnancies, breakups, and every “wait…what?” moment that made me stare at the ceiling.
Proceed accordingly 😅
🌴 What Is The Girls Who Grew Big About?
The Girls Who Grew Big follows a group of teen mothers living in the fictional Florida Panhandle town of Padua Beach. Society has largely abandoned them, their families have failed them, and together they form a tight-knit found family known simply as “the Girls.”
The story mainly centers around:
Simone — the unofficial leader of the group, mother to twins Luck and Lion, living in extreme poverty while trying to survive another unexpected pregnancy.
Emory — ambitious, intelligent, and emotionally confused, balancing motherhood with dreams of college.
Adela — a wealthy teen from Indiana sent away to Florida to hide her pregnancy and give birth in secrecy.
The novel rotates between their perspectives while exploring motherhood, reproductive rights, class divides, queer identity, racism, and survival in the American South.
And honestly? The premise sounded incredible.
Unfortunately… the execution lost me more and more as the book went on 🫠
🌊 My Overall Thoughts
I need to give this book credit for one thing first:
👉 I was NEVER bored.
I went into this book thinking, “I don’t know if a literary fiction novel centered around teen pregnancy is really my thing,” but the author absolutely knows how to keep pages turning. The writing flows quickly, the rotating perspectives help momentum, and there’s always some new drama unfolding.
At no point did I consider DNFing it, which honestly says a lot.
BUT.
The deeper I got into the story, the more the entire thing started feeling emotionally manipulative and strangely unrealistic. The book wanted to feel raw and grounded, but so many details felt exaggerated or downright unbelievable that I stopped seeing real people and started seeing “themes wearing wigs.”
And once that happened, the emotional impact started collapsing for me.
🛻 Simone’s Lifestyle Made Absolutely No Sense
This was probably my biggest issue in the entire book.
Simone:
doesn’t work,
is basically homeless,
lives in a truck in the FLORIDA HEAT with twin children,
struggles constantly for money,
drives around in unsafe conditions…
…and yet somehow creates this warm, thriving, magical motherhood environment where the twins are healthy, adored, fed, clothed, emotionally secure, and apparently have avoided serious intervention from child services for YEARS.
I simply could not suspend disbelief.
And then the book got even more inconsistent.
There’s a scene where Luck gets critically injured after falling off a bunk bed, and Simone completely spirals in guilt over one tiny lapse in attention. It’s portrayed as the ultimate parental failure.
But then later she’s casually driving children around Tallahassee without proper car seats or seat belts?!?!?!
MA’AM 😭
The characterization felt wildly inconsistent depending on what emotional point the scene needed to make.
👵 Every Adult in This Book Felt Like a Cartoon Villain
I understand the novel’s themes. I understand it wanted to explore how society abandons young mothers.
But WOW, the adults in this book were written with the subtlety of a Lifetime movie antagonist holding a lightning machine.
Almost every parent or grandparent is:
cold,
cruel,
emotionally withholding,
irrationally punitive,
or outright monstrous.
At some point it stopped feeling emotionally truthful and started feeling engineered.
Examples:
A grandmother throws her granddaughter and great-grandbaby out DURING A HURRICANE because the baby was crying.
Adela’s mother sends her away to Florida while pregnant and barely speaks to her for eight months.
Emory’s grandparents behave like caricatures whose primary purpose is yelling racist dialogue.
Meanwhile ALL the teen moms are loving, devoted, emotionally mature super-mothers who basically raise each other through the healing power of sisterhood 🌊✨
I wanted more nuance.
Even Adela’s grandmother — probably the closest thing to a decent adult in the book — was still allowing her pregnant 16-year-old granddaughter to date a fully grown 27-year-old man.
Which… HELLO??? 🚩🚩🚩
🏥 The Luck Injury Scene Was Wildly Overdramatic
I’m sorry, but Luck:
falls from a LOW trailer bunk/table situation,
somehow fractures her skull,
breaks her arm,
AND develops a brain bleed???
That is an extremely severe injury from the type of fall described.
The scene felt designed for maximum emotional devastation rather than realism. And once again, the book leaned into emotional intensity over believable storytelling.
🧠 These Teenagers Did Not Sound Like Teenagers
This became more noticeable the longer I read.
One minute these girls are making catastrophically bad life choices.
The next minute they’re delivering profound philosophical monologues about womanhood, motherhood, identity, freedom, survival, the ocean, the land, generational trauma, and female rebirth like tiny beach-dwelling Socrates descendants 🌊
None of them sounded age-appropriate to me.
Not consistently, anyway.
I never fully believed these characters as real teenage girls.
I believed them as literary symbols.
And there IS a difference.
🎓 Emory’s College Admissions Were Completely Unconvincing
I genuinely laughed when Emory apparently got into multiple elite colleges including Stanford.
Excuse me.
The book gives us:
good grades,
teen motherhood,
and vibes.
That’s basically it.
No extracurriculars.
No leadership activities.
No volunteer work.
No academic competitions.
No major mentorships.
No explanation for how she stood out in one of the most competitive admissions pools in the country.
Apparently Stanford admissions officers were just sitting around like:
“Wow, she hangs out at the beach with her friends. ACCEPT HER IMMEDIATELY.” 📝
🐋 The Orca Scene Sent Me Into Orbit
THE DEAD ORCA.
WHAT WAS THAT 😭
First:
Orcas are VERY rarely seen in the Gulf of Mexico.
Second:
Why are these teenagers personally handling a giant dead marine mammal situation instead of calling literally ANY wildlife authority???
Third:
The scene goes on forever and becomes this giant symbolic emotional experience that felt completely disconnected from reality.
By this point the novel had fully entered “dreamlike literary metaphor zone,” and unfortunately that’s not really my thing unless the story establishes that tone from the beginning.
🌈 The Secret Hidden Gay Club in the Florida Wilderness 😭
I’m sorry but this setting broke me.
So there’s apparently:
a hidden LGBTQ+ club,
deep in the Florida woods,
impossible to locate,
requiring stumbling through the wilderness to discover,
yet simultaneously crowded, loud, smoking meats, blasting music, and full of partying people.
HOW 😭
How was this hidden?!
How could nobody find it?!
How were they wandering around like they’d discovered Brigadoon?!
The setting details throughout this novel often felt paper-thin, and this was the moment where I fully gave up trying to make logistical sense of anything.
💔 The Adela / Tooth / Simone Drama Was Messy in the BEST Way
Now THIS part?
Absolutely entertaining.
When Adela realizes that sweet lifeguard Chris is actually Tooth — Simone’s ex and father of her twins — I was SAT 👀🍿
That entire reveal sequence was probably the strongest stretch of the book for me.
Messy.
Chaotic.
Toxic.
Compelling.
No notes.
Well… except maybe:
WHY ARE SO MANY GROWN MEN DATING TEENAGERS IN THIS BOOK?!?!?!
🌊 The Ending
By the end:
Emory breaks off her engagement to Jayden,
chooses college and independence,
Adela decides to keep her baby,
Simone decides to leave town with the twins,
and Adela gives birth on the beach surrounded by the Girls.
The ending clearly aims for something healing and empowering — motherhood reclaimed through chosen family and female solidarity.
And I can absolutely see why this book will work emotionally for many readers.
Unfortunately, by that point, the unrealistic plot points and exaggerated characterization had pulled me too far out of the story.
Instead of crying, I was mostly sitting there like:
“…wait, HOW did we get here?” 😭
📖 Final Thoughts
This wasn’t a terrible reading experience because the author undeniably knows how to create momentum and emotional intensity. I stayed engaged the entire time.
But for me, the novel sacrificed realism in favor of symbolism and emotional messaging too often.
The characters frequently felt less like actual people and more like representations of ideas:
motherhood,
girlhood,
resilience,
oppression,
found family,
reproductive autonomy.
And while those themes are important, I still need the world and characters to feel believable.
Instead, this book often felt emotionally engineered rather than emotionally authentic.
Still… it was undeniably readable.
And honestly? I would probably still pick up another book by Leila Mottley because the woman can WRITE. ✍️
Just maybe next time with fewer mystery forest gay clubs and surprise Gulf Coast orcas.
📚 Books I’d Recommend Instead
If you liked parts of this book but want something that felt more emotionally grounded or believable:
🌟 Teen Motherhood / Young Women Facing Hardship
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
🌊 Messy Female Friendship & Coming-of-Age
Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane
💔 Literary Fiction About Complicated Women
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood
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