Brutes
A Novel
-
-
2.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
The Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project in this wildly original debut—a coming-of-age story about the crucible of girlhood, from a writer of rare and startling talent
We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones.
In Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers—something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they see will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the "we" of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tate's uneven debut tracks an ensemble cast of teenage girls who long to escape their suffocating hometown of Falls Landing, Fla. After cool older girl Sammy disappears, a group of 13-year-olds who'd obsessed over her wonder what happened. Chapters alternate perspectives, including that of chorus-like entries from the girls' collective point of view as well as individual narrators such as Isabel, one of the girls' mothers, who describes the nightmarish landscape defined by toxic lakes, alligators, and hurricanes ("The light fades and the whole place just looks like something about to die"). Hazel, one of the girls, delivers alarming lines inflected by philosophy: "If I've learned anything, it's that even movement becomes another kind of stillness if you force it to last too long." While the language has mesmerizing moments, the repetitiveness of the first-person plural passages blunt the impact: "We shook our bangled wrists... we didn't know what it meant... we were in the mood where nothing was going to make us happy." As the girls look for Sammy, they also dream about appearing on a talent show and finding fame in Los Angeles. The finale's murky, and the author leans a bit too much on the missing-girl trope. It's an often beautiful work, but it's also exhausting.
