Precocious Pearl lives in a car in a trailer park community with her mother. Pearl's life is changed by a gun shot.

I read this in two sittings because it was so gripping, but then wished it was longer!

This is a gorgeous, glorious little novel with poetry on every page. The author’s love for language is paramount, and she drew me right into Pearl and Margot’s strange but hypnotic world. Pearl is fourteen, and she lives with her mother in a car on the edge of a trailer park in Florida. It’s the only home she’s ever known. She has one friend, an older girl who lives in the trailer park, and the two of them steal cigarettes and escape their claustrophobic lives together.

I could feel the guns of the title hovering and I was on edge, waiting for one to go off. And when it did, the novel took quite a different and unexpected turn, but was no less beautiful for it.