Susan Sanford Blades
Coming March 16, 2027!!!
My second novel, Girl On Paper, is available for pre-order now!
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.
Honest, vulnerable, and gorgeous, Girl On Paper reveals the pain a girl can experience before she’s even decided what kind of girl she is. Susan Sanford Blades captures characters with uncanny sharpness, in sentences packed with such dizzying wit that they startle you with their truth. Here is the vivid, messy world of a teenage girl—mothers, best friends, and the boys she dates and almost dates—in the short gasp of girlhood before she steps out of Edmonton and into the rest of her life.
--Shashi Bhat, author of Death by a Thousand Cuts
Affirming Susan Sanford Blades as the coolest writer in CanLit, Girl On Paper is an honest, edgy, and gorgeously rendered literary coming-of-age novel whose ’90s analogue vibes recall everything that’s eternal about girlhood. A story of daughters and mothers, best friends and crappy boyfriends, zines and mixtapes, and what it means to be lost and found inside of music, Girl On Paper hits all the right notes—especially the dissonant ones—and the sounds keep on ringing after the last page is done.
—Kerry Clare, author of Definitely Thriving