Chicken Girl

Poppy is a 16-year-old who has lost sight of joy in her life. She’s in a deep funk, spending her time literally hiding herself inside a chicken suit in her job advertising a neighborhood restaurant. When a six-year-old customer named Miracle invites Poppy to visit where she spends her nights, under the Fifth Street bridge, Poppy is intrigued enough to go. The people she meets are mostly lonely misfits rather than the truly homeless, and Poppy feels safe enough in this alien environment to become part of a group, something she hasn’t been able to do since she experienced online ridicule. As Poppy’s summer progresses, she finds love and friendship, but not in the exact ways she expected.

Poppy’s many interests (roller derby, post-war architecture, vintage fashion) establish her as a quirky and adorable person. She’s abandoned most of her passions though, now that she feels betrayed by everything. Sometimes it seems like Poppy’s collection of traits and hobbies are standing in for her personality and that some angles are missing from this character study. Poppy often tells readers how she feels and why, rather than letting this understanding develop naturally though the storytelling. Even though Poppy’s choices don’t always seem to make internal sense, she is still an appealing character, and most readers will care about her and want to join her to the end of her journey.

The novel tackles a profound question: how can teens understand and deal with the existence of evil in the world? Once they have seen darkness, how do they cope? Poppy has learned that there is real malevolence in the world, something she had been sheltered from and did not expect. The precipitating event happened six months before the beginning of the novel, but Poppy can’t move on. A photo of her, dressed as her beloved role model, Rosie the Riveter, was shared on a site called ISeeFatPeople, where people mocked her appearance. This shocked her into a crisis, and the world doesn’t make sense anymore. What readers see is the aftermath.

In a way, the exact details of Poppy’s distress are not important. What is most important is that her faith in the world as a good place has been shaken. However, given what many of her peers and friends are going through in the story (sexual assault, gender transition, homelessness, poverty), being fat shamed by anonymous strangers on an external website is pretty mild fare. Poppy is loved and supported, and it is not completely clear why this event was so traumatic. Poppy actually has a pretty strong self-image and has not been self-conscious about her body. Being a person with a fat body is often used as the ‘problem’ for female teen characters, and I would have liked to see something a little more nuanced used here. In any case, Poppy chooses to wallow in the darkness, watching disturbing videos all day. Smith presents Poppy as a girl having a philosophical and spiritual crisis rather than as a teen experiencing depression, but I believe the novel should have confronted that issue.

It is not clear why visiting the bridge with Miracle is the decision Poppy makes in order to kickstart her life. But it is an action, a change, something she has not been able to imagine for six months. It may be a strange or scary decision, but she feels the pull of this liminal space, which is outside her personal experience. She has little internal struggle about immersing herself in a potentially dangerous environment. While it is not explored in the book, this decision hints at self-destructive tendencies. The way Poppy jumps into this world isn’t always understandable, but it does make sense within the context of other attempts to erase herself or make herself into a new or different person.

Chicken Girl stresses the necessity of establishing connections with people and fighting hard for your community. The cast of odd characters that Poppy falls in with, and comes to care deeply about, are all compelling and well-realized characters. Miracle is a charming child, seemingly oblivious to the precarious dangers of her home life. Buck is an odious young man, slumming it with the underclass to mine material for his art. Lewis is a thoughtful and caring transgender teen with a dying father. Thumper is an elderly, damaged man who looks after the younger kids, but he hides a dark past.

Poppy becomes intimate with Buck even after he is verbally abusive while drunk. He clearly fetishizes her body and likes larger girls. And she forgives him, even after he makes rude remarks about her and their other friends. These may be bad decisions, or they may be ways in which Poppy is trying to be mature and enter the adult world. They could also be interpreted as subconsciously destructive behavior.

Lewis, who is transitioning from female to male while also watching his father die, is a wonderful friend to Poppy and a great character. He manages to be caring and optimistic even though much of his family rejects him. He is nothing but supportive to Poppy, though he challenges her when necessary. He calls her out on her idealization of the past and her belief that the 1940s were a simpler, purer time. This is a fantasy, he argues, saying that people have problems whenever they live and that the past is just as ambiguous and difficult as the present. World War II caused untold suffering, women lost the gains they had made as soon as the soldiers returned, and non-mainstream sexuality or gender identities were not tolerated.

The most complex relationship is probably the one between Poppy and her flamboyantly gay twin, Cam. They know each other so well. He can see her suffering, but he doesn’t know what to do. Later, she is in the same situation and is similarly torn about how to help. The story contains good material about how to make difficult decisions to help people we love. One of the main ways the twins communicate is by inventing portmanteaus like ‘nonversation’ and puns like ‘narci-sister’. Their fun word play really brings the sibling dynamic to life. Poppy’s fragile belief in the world is further battered when Cam is sexually assaulted by his boss.

Smith humanizes all of her characters, and none are one-dimensional. There is even a sympathetic portrayal of Miracle’s mother who has become pulled into sex work after losing her husband and succumbing to drug addiction. The central character in Poppy’s struggle to understand the world turns out to be Thumper who seems fragile and caring. Buck is trying to hurt Poppy when he alerts her to Thumper’s violently racist past, and the news is almost more than she can bear. But, if she can come to terms with him and believe that people can change, it will mean that she can also come to terms with the rest of the world and accept it in shades of grey, rather than black and white. Living as her true self without caring who judges her will allow Poppy to escape her life as the ‘chicken girl’ by being brave and present.

Chicken Girl includes some very mature and disturbing subject matter. Poppy spends a lot of free time watching dark videos on YouTube or reading hateful comments. Initially, wallowing in despair is easier for her than trying to reconcile herself to the ambiguities of the world. It is an immature response, but so is much teenage behavior. Sometimes the gritty themes are explored in ways which are a bit gratuitous, and so I would not recommend this book to sensitive readers.

Chicken Girl strongly advocates for the possibility of change and the importance of optimism, even as it acknowledges that bad things happen to good people all the time. Life and integrity are fragile but totally worth fighting for in this story. The novel is also stoutly in favour of the power of personal interaction and the importance of keeping an open mind about people who may seem different or strange. The milieu has an unusual vibe which is both gritty realism and hyper-real fable. There is a lot to enjoy and admire here, including a heroine with a good voice, an immersive setting, an excellent cast of characters and deft pacing.