Susan Sanford Blades

The follow-up to Susan Sanford Blades’s award-winning debut “captures the moody angst of the mid-90s high schooler pitch perfectly.” —The Masters Review

On September 2, 1994, Frances O’Neill turns eighteen and finds out her birth mother’s name and occupation—Sophie Martineau, bassist for riot grrrl band Chixdontdiggit. But when Frances meets Sophie at a gig, she’s more like a flighty older sister than a mother.

Frances has never felt more lost. Her best friend Lil falls for a toxic music snob, the popular hockey boy Frances lost her virginity to doesn’t acknowledge her existence at school and the kinship Frances gradually forms with her birth mother is tentative. Frances takes comfort in creating riot grrrl mixtapes and her zine—a cut, pasted and collaged record of her life. On paper, Frances exists; in riot grrrl, she is understood.

As graduation looms, Frances dreams of joining Sophie on Chixdontdiggit’s summer tour. But is she ready to say goodbye to Lil, to her home in Edmonton and to her notion of the perfect mother?

With crisp prose and dazzling imagery interspersed with Frances’s zine pages and mixtape track lists, Girl On Paper is an introspective and darkly humorous novel, probing the growing sense of power and frustration that defines a girl on the cusp of womanhood.