Tennessee Hill’s debut novel Girls with Long Shadows is a Southern Gothic powerhouse that seeps into your consciousness like humidity on a Texas summer day. Set in the fictional town of Longshadow, this novel plunges readers into the claustrophobic world of identical triplets known only as Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C—girls whose mother died bringing them into the world, leaving them in the care of their grandmother, Gram (the legendary “Manatee”). What unfolds is not merely a coming-of-age tale but a profound meditation on identity, desire, and the desperate need to be recognized as an individual when the world sees you only as one-third of a whole.
The Bayou Beckons: Setting and Atmosphere
Hill’s Longshadow, Texas exists in that liminal space where the mundane meets the mythical. The crumbling golf course named Bayou Bloom serves as both home and prison to the triplets, who maintain it alongside Gram and their adopted brother Gull, who is gradually losing his hearing. The murky waters of the bayou that borders the property becomes both literal and metaphorical—a place where secrets sink and resurface, where town legend Ansley Deer drowned years before, foreshadowing the darkness to come.
Hill writes with an intoxicating lyricism that transforms even the most ordinary scenes into something haunted:
“The bayou had a grip about it. I’d felt it before, holding us hostage on our swims. Yet we gave ourselves to it every morning, not fearing enough that it could steal us away.”
The atmospheric intensity builds through temperature—oppressive heat, sweat-drenched clothes, the cool touch of water—creating sensory immersion that makes Longshadow as tangible as it is suffocating. The novel’s setting feels both expansive in its natural beauty and stifling in its small-town insularity where, as the narrator tells us, “We’d outgrown it, this place, but it refused to outgrow us.”
Three Bodies, One Shadow: Character and Identity
The novel’s narrative unfolds through the eyes of Baby B, the middle triplet, creating a powerful perspective on the central themes of identity and individuality. The triplets are alike physically but disparate in personality:
- Baby A: Reckless, attention-seeking, and increasingly self-destructive, using her body as both weapon and shield
- Baby B: Cautious, observant, forever caught between her sisters’ opposing forces
- Baby C: Introspective, superstitious, seeking answers in horoscopes and palm readings
What makes Hill’s character work so compelling is how she explores the psychological complexity of existing as someone perpetually mistaken for others. The girls’ collective name—”The Manatee’s Girls”—robs them of individual identity while binding them to their grandmother’s local fame. The townspeople’s inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between them becomes not merely an annoyance but a violence of erasure.
The arrival of Pete Martelli—college-bound, handsome, seemingly sensitive—creates ripples in the triplets’ dynamic when he appears to focus his attention exclusively on Baby B. This external validation of her uniqueness becomes intoxicating to her, while Baby A grows increasingly desperate to be seen, even if it means weaponizing their identical appearances.
The Dance of Desire and Violence
Hill demonstrates exceptional skill in depicting teenage female desire without exploiting it. The novel captures that specific adolescent hunger to be both witnessed and wanted. When Baby B reflects, “I wanted to be wanted, maybe more than I wanted to want,” she articulates a particular kind of longing that feels devastatingly authentic.
The novel’s central tensions arise when Baby A begins impersonating Baby B to seduce Pete, setting in motion a series of events culminating in shocking violence. The blurring of identities becomes deadly when Baby A convinces Pete to kill her—an act that spirals the remaining sisters into a labyrinth of grief and questions about autonomy, connection, and blame.
Hill writes this violence and its aftermath with unflinching clarity while maintaining emotional resonance. Particularly effective is how she portrays the trauma response of the remaining sisters, who struggle with self-loathing and the uncanny experience of seeing their dead sister’s face every time they look at each other.
Prose That Pulls You Under
Hill’s distinctive voice is what elevates this debut above similar Southern Gothic novels. Her sentences are both poetic and precise, creating a narrative undertow that refuses to let go:
“My body was her body was a place she moved and lived forever. Even now she was gone, her face still looked out at the town through me, her voice still shimmered when I opened my mouth. It was a flood on top of a flood.”
The novel employs an innovative structural technique with sections titled “[ENTER] Front Porch Chorus” that provide communal commentary, functioning as a Greek chorus that contextualizes the family’s tragedy within the town’s collective consciousness. These sections create breathing room while deepening the story’s mythic qualities.
Where the Shadows Fall Short
Despite its considerable strengths, Girls with Long Shadows occasionally stumbles. The pacing in the middle section drags, particularly as the trial unfolds with somewhat predictable legal maneuvering. Some secondary characters like Julie Martelli and Rich Goodson remain underdeveloped despite their significance to the plot.
The novel’s exploration of grief sometimes tips into repetition, with the surviving sisters cycling through similar emotional territory without advancing their internal journeys. While this accurately reflects the circuitous nature of grieving, it can create narrative stagnation.
Most notably, the resolution feels rushed compared to the meticulous buildup. Baby B’s decision whether to stay or leave Longshadow deserved more space to unfold, particularly given how central questions of escape versus belonging have been to her character throughout.
Verdict: A Remarkable Debut That Lingers
Despite these minor flaws, Girls with Long Shadows announces Tennessee Hill as a formidable literary talent with a distinct voice. The novel sits comfortably alongside works like Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, Emma Cline’s The Girls, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, though Hill brings her own mesmerizing approach to exploring young womanhood in crisis.
What distinguishes Hill’s work is her unflinching examination of how identity forms in the shadow of others—whether sisters, parents, or community—and the sometimes devastating lengths to which young women will go to claim themselves as individuals. Through Baby B’s haunting narration, we confront the terror of never being truly seen for oneself, and the equally terrifying prospect of being seen too clearly.
Lasting Impressions
Girls with Long Shadows isn’t merely a psychological thriller with Gothic trappings; it’s a nuanced exploration of grief, identity, desire, and the complex bonds of sisterhood. Hill has crafted a novel where the ghosts—both literal and figurative—refuse easy exorcism.
The book’s most affecting quality is how it captures that peculiarly adolescent paradox: the simultaneous desire to blend in and stand out, to be connected and autonomous, to be known and inscrutable. In the Binderup triplets, Hill has created characters whose struggles with these contradictions take on life-or-death stakes.
By the novel’s conclusion, when Baby B contemplates the water’s capacity to flood and recede, to devastate and renew, we understand that this is a story about survival in its rawest form—about what remains after tragedy has reshaped everything:
“I became amazed that water evaporates. That one day, all this rain can flood the highway so badly that people pull over and turn their hazards on, sit on the shoulders for hours, and the next, it’s gone somewhere, supposedly lifted up and dissipated. And we know, amazingly, the water will come back again as rain, heavy and bewildering, and will eventually leave in just the same natural way.”
For readers who appreciate atmospheric literary fiction that doesn’t sacrifice plot for prose, Girls with Long Shadows offers a reading experience as immersive and haunting as the bayou waters that flow through its pages. Tennessee Hill’s debut marks her as a significant new voice in Southern Gothic literature, one whose long shadows will likely stretch across many books to come.
