Book Review — The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley

Genre: Literary Fiction
Published by: Knopf
Publish date: June 24, 2025
Number of pages: 352 pages
Author’s website: https://www.leilamottley.com/
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Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

Rating: 4.5/5

This is a novel that has so much heart.

It centers around three young women who have different backgrounds but a unifying circumstance– they have all been pregnant as teenagers in a small and overlooked town in Florida (Padua Beach).

Simone, twenty, has twins from her teenage pregnancy and is now pregnant again. Emory, sixteen, has recently given birth; the father of her baby is Simone’s brother, and she is determined to finish high school and go to college. Adela, a recent transplant to Padua, has been sent here by her parents to have her baby and then put it up for adoption, all under the guise of taking a year abroad.

Simone, through grit and sheer will power, has not only survived as an essentially single mother with no family support, she has raised her twins and created a welcoming place for other girls who find themselves in similar situations. What has formed is a sisterhood called The Girls. She offers support that she wishes she had, even though she’s basically still a girl herself.

As the year progresses (signified by Adela’s trimesters in the book), the three main characters’ lives become intricately intertwined in more ways than one. This book is a testament to the resilience of girls and the joy of girlhood while critiquing the systems that fail young women.