Judy Lohden is your above-average sixteen-year-old: sarcastic and vulnerable, talented and uncertain, full of big dreams for a big future. With a singing voice that can shake an auditorium, she should be the star of Darcy Arts Academy, the local performing arts high school. So why is a girl this promising hiding out in a seedy motel room on the edge of town?
The fact that the national media is on her trail after a controversy that might bring down the whole school could have something to do with it. And that scandal has something—but not everything—to do with the fact that Judy is three feet nine inches tall.
Rachel DeWoskin remembers everything about high school: the auditions (painful), the parents (hovering), the dissection projects (compelling), the friends (outcasts), the boys (crushable), and the girls (complicated), and she lays it all out with a wit and wistfulness that is half Holden Caulfield, half Lee Fiora, Prep’s ironic heroine. Big Girl Small is a scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and unwaveringly serious.
Rachel DeWoskin is the author of the novel Repeat after Me and of Foreign Babes in Beijing, a memoir about her inadvertent notoriety as the star of a Chinese soap opera. She lives in New York City and Beijing and is at work on her fourth book, Statutory.
Kim Liggett is the author of the Blood and Salt series, The Unfortunates, The Grace Year, and The Last Harvest, winner of the Bram Stoker Award. At sixteen, Kim left her rural midwestern town for New York City, where she pursued a career in music. Along with lending her voice to hundreds of studio recordings, she was a backup singer for some of the biggest rock bands in the '80s. After settling down to have a family, she became an entrepreneur, creating a children's art education program and a travel company specializing in tours for musicians. She has two beautiful children.
Tai Sammons earned her degree in theater from Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where she worked at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This award-winning actress currently resides upstate in Portland, with her beloved black pug, Oscar.