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Loading... Brutesby Dizz Tate
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) fountainoverflows | Mar 22, 2023 | 
The conceit of the novel echoes a familiar voyeurism: What happens when a pretty girl goes missing? How do we glorify her or misunderstand her? Tate uses these timeworn questions as a springboard for a larger examination of trauma and memory. But right when I thought I could predict this novel’s arc, it surprised me....Just as the novelty of a collective psyche begins to wither, the voice breaks apart. The girls begin to individuate....The shift is a breath of air, a creative leap with manifold payoffs, heightening the book’s ambition. The things we think we understand as children become completely different, supplanted with the knowledge of adulthood. By the end, “Brutes” feels wonderfully untethered, wild and unpredictable.... The novel is an exploration of adolescent trauma and its otherworldly manifestations rather than a retelling of a trope. On the first page of Dizz Tate's debut novel Brutes, a 14-year-old girl has gone missing from Falls Landing, Florida, where screams from nearby theme parks ripple through the air and a foreboding lake divides a walled-off development from rundown apartment towers....Much of Brutes unspools in this mesmerizing first-person plural, in the hive mind of five girls and a queer boy (considered one of them) — Leila, Britney, Jody, Hazel, Isabel, and Christian — who scorch their bare feet as they creep around on "white-hot sidewalks" and take in the town's secrets. They are the titular brutes, who revel in pulling mean-spirited stunts that tighten their bonds. In plunging the reader into the girls' collective perspective, Brutes makes for an original and stylistically ambitious take on the well-trodden subject matter of girls in peril. 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”)....While the language has mesmerizing moments, the repetitiveness of the first-person plural passages blunt the impact.... 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. When the preacher's daughter goes missing, gossip reverberates throughout a small Florida town, where some lurks beneath the lake. A group of young girls, deemed "brutes" by their mothers, are the only ones in Falls Landing who know where Sammy is....Tate's debut novel is for readers looking for a riveting plot only topped by its captivating voices, at times honest and vulnerable, at others chilling in their detachment. Tate's prose enhances the conspiratorial relationship of these characters bonded by fickle friendship pacts, violence, and love. Simultaneously disturbing and sentimental. Brutes is a true reflection of girlhood. A group of tween girls in Florida moves through the aftermath of the disappearance of one of their own.... Though most of the novel is written from the collective point of view of the girls, Tate intercuts the main narrative with some short chapters from adult versions of individual girls, all of them in various stages of imploding their own lives. These offer welcome reprieves from the cool veneer of the collective narration, which feels both conceptually satisfying but emotionally aloof, until everything—structure, story, and sense—shatters apart at the novel’s climax. Tate’s novel feels a bit like avant-garde fashion: surreal, impractical, but beautiful to see. A promising first book whose enigmatic nature is both frustrating and alluring.
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. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.0000Literature English (North America) American fiction By typeLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (2.39)
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