Towelhead - Alicia Erian

A painfully funny, shocking, tender and redemptive novel about a girl failed by her parents, and trying to find the love she needs.

When Jasira’s mother discovers her boyfriend’s feelings for her thirteen-year-old daughter, she packs Jasira off to Houston, Texas, to live with the Daddy she barely knows. Her father is a remote figure, unable to show his daughter the love she craves, and still less able to handle her feelings about her changing body, which Jasira begins to suspect disgusts him. School is a lonely place for a ‘towelhead’ in the run up to the first Gulf War, and when her father meets, and forbids her to see, her boyfriend, Jasira has to look elsewhere for affection. She begins her search close to home, with a neighbour, Mr Vuoso: a man with an extensive collection of
Playboy , who doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with Jasira’s body at all…