What do you think?
Rate this book
The Butcher Shop Girl: A Memoir for Misfits & Mavericks
Misfits finish FIRST in this true story. Action, extreme adventure, romance await.
About the Book:
The Butcher Shop Girl begins with Carmen’s unique coming-of-age as she’s ripped from her extended family after her Catholic parents’ divorce. Learning to conquer unusual places in the name of survival, Carmen spends her childhood working in her mother’s slaughterhouse in prairie Alberta, tearing through flesh and getting up to trouble. To escape a violent home, she bounces from house to house, working on the family farm, and eventually in the oil patch.
At eighteen, Carmen’s competitive craving for money and independence leads her to a career as an exotic dancer. Starting out in seedy small-town dives, she quickly earns her place in high-end clubs throughout North America, becoming an elite world-travelling entertainer. Carmen lives the high life and makes big money. She parties with the Hells Angels and falls in love with a sexy U.S. drug enforcement agent—effortlessly walking the line of two extreme worlds. But when run-ins with premium organized crime land her in Bolivia, she realizes she’s gone too far, and the only thing that can free her is to ask her estranged family for help.
The Butcher Shop Girl is a compelling memoir of resilience and persistence that captures the vivacious spirit of a small-town girl determined to succeed by any means necessary.
About the Book:
The Butcher Shop Girl begins with Carmen’s unique coming-of-age as she’s ripped from her extended family after her Catholic parents’ divorce. Learning to conquer unusual places in the name of survival, Carmen spends her childhood working in her mother’s slaughterhouse in prairie Alberta, tearing through flesh and getting up to trouble. To escape a violent home, she bounces from house to house, working on the family farm, and eventually in the oil patch.
At eighteen, Carmen’s competitive craving for money and independence leads her to a career as an exotic dancer. Starting out in seedy small-town dives, she quickly earns her place in high-end clubs throughout North America, becoming an elite world-travelling entertainer. Carmen lives the high life and makes big money. She parties with the Hells Angels and falls in love with a sexy U.S. drug enforcement agent—effortlessly walking the line of two extreme worlds. But when run-ins with premium organized crime land her in Bolivia, she realizes she’s gone too far, and the only thing that can free her is to ask her estranged family for help.
The Butcher Shop Girl is a compelling memoir of resilience and persistence that captures the vivacious spirit of a small-town girl determined to succeed by any means necessary.
284 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 2020
6 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 11, 2021
I wanted to like this book. But the writing style was mediocre and bland, while the characters seemed flat and little more than props to set the author up as some sort of larger than life hero. Honestly, it read like an angry 12 year olds interpretation of how unfair their life is.
March 1, 2022
Really should have been titled "Memoir of a teenaged stripper: A girl's struggle with a broken home, shame, and rebellion."
November 16, 2020
4 Stars
I received a copy of "The Butcher Shop Girl" from NetGalley and Friesen Press in exchange for an honest review and I can honestly say I really enjoyed this book. The story was very well written and quite mesmerizing. I found myself unable to stop reading once I started.
I love reading memoirs and Carmen's memoir certainly doesn't disappoint and I love the fact that it's a Canadian memoir as I am a fellow Canadian. Carmen's story was truly remarkable from start to finish. She had an interesting childhood learning to work on the farm and in a butcher shop and she did not shy away from describing these experiences which was an incredible learning opportunity for her readers.
During her young adult years, Carmen ventured into the world of exotic dancing and concentrated on performing and traveling throughout the western part of Canada and South America. Her talents as a dancer helped to set up her financial future.
"The Butcher Shop Girl" is a coming of age story that reminds readers that we are all trying to find ourselves and make a life for us. If you enjoy memoirs, this one is a definite must read. Carmen did such a great job and bringing her story to life!
I received a copy of "The Butcher Shop Girl" from NetGalley and Friesen Press in exchange for an honest review and I can honestly say I really enjoyed this book. The story was very well written and quite mesmerizing. I found myself unable to stop reading once I started.
I love reading memoirs and Carmen's memoir certainly doesn't disappoint and I love the fact that it's a Canadian memoir as I am a fellow Canadian. Carmen's story was truly remarkable from start to finish. She had an interesting childhood learning to work on the farm and in a butcher shop and she did not shy away from describing these experiences which was an incredible learning opportunity for her readers.
During her young adult years, Carmen ventured into the world of exotic dancing and concentrated on performing and traveling throughout the western part of Canada and South America. Her talents as a dancer helped to set up her financial future.
"The Butcher Shop Girl" is a coming of age story that reminds readers that we are all trying to find ourselves and make a life for us. If you enjoy memoirs, this one is a definite must read. Carmen did such a great job and bringing her story to life!
November 14, 2020
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
I was expecting this book to be quite superficial and shallow but I sure was wrong! Carmen really has a lot of introspection and it shows in her writing. From being a farm girl, to butcher shop girl, to oil field worker, to stripper/dancer. I've never read a book with quite this array of topics. This is a well written and fascinating story.
I was expecting this book to be quite superficial and shallow but I sure was wrong! Carmen really has a lot of introspection and it shows in her writing. From being a farm girl, to butcher shop girl, to oil field worker, to stripper/dancer. I've never read a book with quite this array of topics. This is a well written and fascinating story.
December 7, 2020
My pick for book club was to be a memoir or biography and I wanted it to be something different and exciting - and I found it in the BSG!
Carmen’s stories of growing up and what she and her brother went through as kids tugged at my heartstrings. I was rooting for her all the way through and so impressed by her resilience and devil-may-care attitude.
I really identified with her leaving the farm and the path that she was expected to take when she was so young and naive and finding herself in her own way and on her own terms.
Carmen’s stories of growing up and what she and her brother went through as kids tugged at my heartstrings. I was rooting for her all the way through and so impressed by her resilience and devil-may-care attitude.
I really identified with her leaving the farm and the path that she was expected to take when she was so young and naive and finding herself in her own way and on her own terms.
November 30, 2020
Carmen’s story of a difficult childhood and her adventurous transition into young adulthood was fascinating. What a great read!!
December 21, 2020
The Butcher Shop Girl opens with a scene set in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where the author is trying to escape her employer, the owner of an exotic dancer club. But this book isn’t about Bolivia and it isn’t exclusively about exotic dancing; it’s about a small-town girl from central Canada who is in charge of her own destiny.
I picked up The Butcher Shop Girl because the title reminded me of a memoir written by the author of Julie & Julia. The author of a blog and best-selling memoir that was turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, Julie Powell wrote a second memoir that was not nearly so well-received: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession. Cleaving is about a woman who works in a butcher shop.
Carmen Kissel-Verrier, the author of The Butcher Shop Girl, tells a better story about a woman who works in a butcher shop. And who can resist a subtitle like “A Memoir for Misfits & Mavericks”?
I was fortunate to have received an Advanced Review Copy of The Butcher Shop Girl on Reedsy Discovery.
Kissel-Verrier grew up on a farm and followed in her mother’s footsteps, working in a slaughter house, and initially, she’s proud to do it. Until the day her classmates tour the facility on a field trip, the telling of which explains the book’s title:
“The meat cutters, who had become like family to me by that time, were working that day, slicing a side of beef. All the kids winced at the high-pitched sound of the saw cutting through bone and turned away from the sight of something that had become such a huge part of who I was. Their abhorrence to see animal flesh crushed me. I showed them what I did after school, and what was a big part of my life, only to be met with jeers and sneers. And once I showed them, they never let it go. I was known from then on as the dirty butcher shop girl.”
The Butcher Shop Girl is described as “a compelling memoir of resilience and persistence that captures the vivacious spirit of a small-town girl determined to succeed by any means necessary.” Well, not any means necessary, but the memoir does recount Kissel-Verrier’s rather unusual and fascinating journey from farm to oil fields to exotic dance clubs. At one point she describes herself as having “ballsiness, my kind of tomboyish-ness in a really pretty package. … I was unexpected”; her memoir is like that, too: unexpected.
As a native of Minnesota, I especially appreciated her descriptions of remote Canada. The book contains a touching story about the fate of a calf she raised for 4-H, accounts of “bush parties” where teenagers in remote Canada gathered to carouse, descriptions of winter that involved temperatures of minus 30 or 40 degrees Celsius (whether it’s on the Fahrenheit or Celsius scale, that’s darn cold), wearing Wrangler jeans, why “making hay while the sun shines” is a saying, and a biker bar called the Northpole. This book is as much about place as it is about person, and Kissel-Verrier immerses the reader in the narrative.
Eventually, Kissel-Verrier figures out the big money lies in the oil industry. The story moves into SAGD thermal oil harvest operations and cold flow oil, and Kissel-Verrier does justice to these rather arcane professions. And then she figures out how to make even bigger money as an exotic dancer just as the live nude entertainment industry is waning before an onslaught of online pornography. She describes the history of the industry in a single sentence: “It started out by showing a tiny bit of ankle in the mid 1880s and was collapsing in a cesspool of dissolved fantasy by the year 2000.”
Just when the reader might wonder how a meat cutter and an exotic dancer are in the same story, let alone the same person, Kissel-Verrier ties it all together: “At the farm or when I was slicing meat in the butcher shop, there was no modesty. It was just biology. It was just physiology… So taking my clothes off and getting the money felt oddly similar.” Anything but a victim, she accurately describes the power a (successful) exotic dancer has over her clientele. I liked this book the same upbeat way Kissel-Verrier describes the dressing room of a strip club: “I felt like I was backstage at a theater. It may have been a little sleazier and a little sketchier, but it felt the same and featured rum!”
With lines like “hair so bleached it looked crispy enough to crumble in a strong breeze,” Kissel-Verrier is a compelling storyteller. I can’t speak for the ebook, but the interior of the printed version of The Butcher Shop Girl is lovely. The editing is tight and each chapter begins with a relevant quote from sources like Jane Austen and George Washington. It’s well done.
This book is an example of why I like memoir so much. The Butcher Shop Girl gave me a different perspective on the world through Kissel-Verrier’s unique lens.
I picked up The Butcher Shop Girl because the title reminded me of a memoir written by the author of Julie & Julia. The author of a blog and best-selling memoir that was turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, Julie Powell wrote a second memoir that was not nearly so well-received: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession. Cleaving is about a woman who works in a butcher shop.
Carmen Kissel-Verrier, the author of The Butcher Shop Girl, tells a better story about a woman who works in a butcher shop. And who can resist a subtitle like “A Memoir for Misfits & Mavericks”?
I was fortunate to have received an Advanced Review Copy of The Butcher Shop Girl on Reedsy Discovery.
Kissel-Verrier grew up on a farm and followed in her mother’s footsteps, working in a slaughter house, and initially, she’s proud to do it. Until the day her classmates tour the facility on a field trip, the telling of which explains the book’s title:
“The meat cutters, who had become like family to me by that time, were working that day, slicing a side of beef. All the kids winced at the high-pitched sound of the saw cutting through bone and turned away from the sight of something that had become such a huge part of who I was. Their abhorrence to see animal flesh crushed me. I showed them what I did after school, and what was a big part of my life, only to be met with jeers and sneers. And once I showed them, they never let it go. I was known from then on as the dirty butcher shop girl.”
The Butcher Shop Girl is described as “a compelling memoir of resilience and persistence that captures the vivacious spirit of a small-town girl determined to succeed by any means necessary.” Well, not any means necessary, but the memoir does recount Kissel-Verrier’s rather unusual and fascinating journey from farm to oil fields to exotic dance clubs. At one point she describes herself as having “ballsiness, my kind of tomboyish-ness in a really pretty package. … I was unexpected”; her memoir is like that, too: unexpected.
As a native of Minnesota, I especially appreciated her descriptions of remote Canada. The book contains a touching story about the fate of a calf she raised for 4-H, accounts of “bush parties” where teenagers in remote Canada gathered to carouse, descriptions of winter that involved temperatures of minus 30 or 40 degrees Celsius (whether it’s on the Fahrenheit or Celsius scale, that’s darn cold), wearing Wrangler jeans, why “making hay while the sun shines” is a saying, and a biker bar called the Northpole. This book is as much about place as it is about person, and Kissel-Verrier immerses the reader in the narrative.
Eventually, Kissel-Verrier figures out the big money lies in the oil industry. The story moves into SAGD thermal oil harvest operations and cold flow oil, and Kissel-Verrier does justice to these rather arcane professions. And then she figures out how to make even bigger money as an exotic dancer just as the live nude entertainment industry is waning before an onslaught of online pornography. She describes the history of the industry in a single sentence: “It started out by showing a tiny bit of ankle in the mid 1880s and was collapsing in a cesspool of dissolved fantasy by the year 2000.”
Just when the reader might wonder how a meat cutter and an exotic dancer are in the same story, let alone the same person, Kissel-Verrier ties it all together: “At the farm or when I was slicing meat in the butcher shop, there was no modesty. It was just biology. It was just physiology… So taking my clothes off and getting the money felt oddly similar.” Anything but a victim, she accurately describes the power a (successful) exotic dancer has over her clientele. I liked this book the same upbeat way Kissel-Verrier describes the dressing room of a strip club: “I felt like I was backstage at a theater. It may have been a little sleazier and a little sketchier, but it felt the same and featured rum!”
With lines like “hair so bleached it looked crispy enough to crumble in a strong breeze,” Kissel-Verrier is a compelling storyteller. I can’t speak for the ebook, but the interior of the printed version of The Butcher Shop Girl is lovely. The editing is tight and each chapter begins with a relevant quote from sources like Jane Austen and George Washington. It’s well done.
This book is an example of why I like memoir so much. The Butcher Shop Girl gave me a different perspective on the world through Kissel-Verrier’s unique lens.
March 31, 2021
Good Memoir. It kept me interested. I listened on Audible and the narration was really well done.
The majority of the book was about Carmen's life as a stripper and how much she enjoyed that chapter in her life, until she didn't and gave it up. She does talk about her family and her upbringing. Her life with her uncaring Mother and life working on the farm and in the slaughter house.
I would have liked to hear more about her upbringing & what happened later on in adulthood. Did she ever reconcile with her Mother? What happened after her exotic dancer days ended? I only heard a snippet about her life now at the end of the book.
I would definitely listen to another book by this Author. Her life is fascinating to me.
The majority of the book was about Carmen's life as a stripper and how much she enjoyed that chapter in her life, until she didn't and gave it up. She does talk about her family and her upbringing. Her life with her uncaring Mother and life working on the farm and in the slaughter house.
I would have liked to hear more about her upbringing & what happened later on in adulthood. Did she ever reconcile with her Mother? What happened after her exotic dancer days ended? I only heard a snippet about her life now at the end of the book.
I would definitely listen to another book by this Author. Her life is fascinating to me.
November 27, 2020
This book is wonderful, I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy it. I didn't think I would be interested in reading a story about someone who worked as a dancer in Strip Clubs.
However, it's a story about an independent strong willed woman and her transition to adulthood. Wonderful insight about growing up on a farm and living in rural Canada.
It was addictive at times and wasn't the best pick to read before going to sleep because I ended up reading an extra hour night because I didn't want it to end.
I love Carmen's strength and the way she chose to define her life and not be pressured to comply.
However, it's a story about an independent strong willed woman and her transition to adulthood. Wonderful insight about growing up on a farm and living in rural Canada.
It was addictive at times and wasn't the best pick to read before going to sleep because I ended up reading an extra hour night because I didn't want it to end.
I love Carmen's strength and the way she chose to define her life and not be pressured to comply.
April 28, 2021
A coming of age memoir as she grows up in a small town and comes from an abusive and divorced home. Finding your way at a young age can be hard and full of troubled times. I think this memoir helps others who have struggled to find their way and hopefully they will tell their stories one day also. As the title states a memoir for misfits and mavericks. A good read that gives you insight to Carmen's life and how she found her way.
February 15, 2021
Read it in two days! I couldn't put it down. Such a good book ❤️
June 29, 2021
3.5 stars-rounded up to four.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews