Whores on the Hill

Whores on the Hill is the story of three girls — Astrid, Juli and Thisbe — growing up at the last all-girls’ school in Milwaukee. 

Whores on the Hill was selected as a May Must Read by Glamour magazine.  It was picked by NPR as a “Best Debut.” The Boston Globe called it
“…an honest, poignant, beautifully written story about teenage sex, from
a young woman’s point of view.”

BUY THE BOOK:

—————————–

READ A SAMPLE CHAPTER:

Demon Ride

We stood, the three of us, Astrid, Juli and me, between the ping pong table and the wet bar in the basement of somebody’s house.  Astrid tapped her serrated nose with one black fingernail, the dimpled nose that gave her face a feral, cat-like expression.  She flipped up her collar, preppie-style, and eyed a dark-looking, tough guy sucking a shot of Jagermeister off an ice luge dripping in the utility sink.

We were fifteen.  The world hadn’t even started for us yet, only Astrid taught us to look at the world slant-wise.  She cut her wet, almond-shaped eyes at Jagermeister kid and said, “Okay, sure.  Like, that’s him.” 

“You want him?”  Juli asked.

And we were walking. Read more….

—————————–

WHORES ON THE HILL WALKING TOUR OF MILWAUKEE

The sights, the sounds.

(External link)

—————————–

PRESS

What people are saying about Whores on the Hill:

BOSTON GLOBE
“(R)emarkable first novel…an honest, poignant, beautifully written story about teenage sex, from a young woman’s point of view…The book is raw and explicit, but it has a kind of sweetness, too, as the girls, innocent in so many ways, struggle toward adulthood. Curran’s writing is fresh and authentic, with a singular rhythm that perfectly suits her subject.”
–Diane White

HARTFORD COURANT
“Bitter, funny, wise and poignant, these risk-takers grow up the hard way and their toughness is only a cover-up for the pain of making the trip from girlhood to womanhood without fracturing their essential hearts of gold.”
-Carole Goldberg

Read more press…

—————————–

VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE COVER:

French

Brazil

Japanese

First American version

Final American version

—————————–

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: “Whores on the Hill” short story

This is the short story that sparked Whores on the Hill: A Novel. I wrote it about a year before I started the novel.

Everybody called us the “Whores on the Hill,” but that didn’t stop us. Plaid wool skirts, we all had to wear them, hemmed three inches above the knee. The nuns always threatened to get out the ruler, to rip out the stitches, but they never did. Our real name was Sacred Heart Holy Angels. That’s two schools in one.

Sacred Heart used to be downtown, on Lake Drive, where the girls wore Tartan plaid. But registration dropped, it disappeared, who wants to go to a single-sex school anymore? So they brought all the Sacred Heart girls over to Holy Angels. We were the last all-girls’ school in Milwaukee. Read more…