AT THE emergency foster home, they call the children "shoots". The word invokes growth and greenness, but it has a different meaning in the 21st-century Florida of Jennifer Clement's "Gun Love". "We call you children shoots because your parents were shot," a social worker tells 14-year-old Pearl France, the narrator. Pearl grew up in a trailer park, and not even in a trailer: she lived in a battered Mercury, its tyres flat, the boot full of heirlooms that Margot, her mother, purloined when she fled home as a pregnant teenager. Margot dies halfway through the novel, but her fate is foreshadowed from the first pages. "In our part of Florida things were always being gifted a bullet just for the sake of it," Pearl says.
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