The Year Of Needy Girls: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Deirdre Murphy and her partner SJ Edmonds have just moved to the West End of Bradley, Massachusetts, where Deirdre teaches French to girls at Brandywine Academy. A dedicated teacher from a working-class background, she is well loved by her students, and this particular fall, living for the first time in an open relationship with SJ should be her happiest yet. But the murder of 10-year-old Leo from the East End changes everything - for Deirdre and SJ, for the girls at Brandywine, and for all of Bradley. When Deirdre is falsely accused of sexually molesting one of her students, the town erupts.

Reviews

Smith is an artist of prose, utilizing her palette to create a complex landscape of anger and ignorance...Extremely relevant.
--Thoughts on This n' That

The Year of Needy Girls is a study in hypocrisy and small-town secrets. Patricia A. Smith's contemporary witch hunt north of Boston is a collision of The Children's Hour and Mystic River.
--Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing

The Year of Needy Girls is as much about how fear can cloud our perceptions of both self and other as it is about the persistent search for love and home. Patricia A. Smith's vision is at once keen and generous.
--Elizabeth Graver, author of The End of the Point

This is one of those compulsively readable novels that keeps you up far too late at night. A thrum of dread begins on the opening pages, and yet the two heroines are so compassionately drawn, so understandably flawed, that you keep hoping, against all reason, that nothing will happen to them. Patricia A. Smith's portrait of a paranoid community is gripping: a Salem of the twenty-first century.
--Suzanne Berne, author of the The Dogs of Littlefield

This is one of those compulsively readable novels that keeps you up far too late at night. A thrum of dread begins on the opening pages, and yet the two heroines are so compassionately drawn, so understandably flawed, that you keep hoping, against all reason, that nothing will happen to them. Patricia A. Smith's portrait of a paranoid community is gripping: a Salem of the twenty-first century.
--Suzanne Berne, author of the The Dogs of Littlefield

Author Bio

Patricia A. Smith's nonfiction has appeared in several anthologies including One Teacher in Ten: Gay and Lesbian Educators Tell Their Stories and One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium: LGBT Educators Speak Out About What's Gotten Better . . . and What Hasn't. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Salon, Broad Street, Prime Number, and Gris-Gris. The Year of Needy Girls is her first novel. A native New Englander, Smith now lives in Chester, Virginia, with her partner.