LoveReading Says
With something of a Virgin Suicides vibe, Dizz Tate’s Brutes gifts a raw and mesmerising account of girlhood as it follows a clutch of thirteen-year-old Floridians.
Much of the narrative springs from a collective “We” - “We didn’t care about men, and we didn’t believe in miracles”; “We weren’t always mean. We weren’t always nice. We worked hard to surprise ourselves” – which gives this novel its uniquely powerful voice, laying bare complex bonds between friends as they navigate early teen-hood with all its obsessions, mania, longings and dreams.
At the heart of the story is a missing preacher’s daughter the girls have long obsessed over. Sammy shaved off all her hair, while “we thought of our hair like our magic trick.” While everyone goes into overdrive to find her, the girls uncover a dark secret about their town’s apparent road to fame, fortune and freedom. So many lines jab and linger (“We were not, and never would be, satisfied.” “Is everything we find beautiful fake?”), and the shift to individual narratives is slick and blisteringly powerful.
“We feel electric waves through our bones,” the collective voice choruses during one charged scene, and such is the power of this story — Brutes electrifies to the bone.
Joanne Owen
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Brutes Synopsis
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 uncover 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.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780571374458 |
| Publication date: |
1st February 2024 |
| Author: |
Dizz Tate |
| Publisher: |
Faber & Faber |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
240 pages |
| Primary Genre |
General Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Dizz Tate Press Reviews
Polyphonically technicolour and lushly textured, Brutes is a defiant elegy to the myth of girlhood innocence. Dizz Tate's talent is brazen - and brilliant. -- Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure
Assured, insightful, quietly savage, Dizz Tate is capable of conjuring a whole world. -- Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them a Good Time
The mystery and the danger of being a girl, of feeling crazy and vulnerable and wild, wanting to run away and be someone-anyone-is captured here across a landscape of nail polish and fire and sex, a sinister lake and the pink sky of Florida. Brutes is a beautiful and deeply strange novel, full of dread and longing. I loved it. -- Mariana Enríquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire
Innovative, urgent, and endlessly lush, Brutes is the rapturous story of darkly shifting allegiances among a group of obsessive teenage girls. A masterful sentence maker, Tate is a startling and singular new voice, and her debut novel is so taut and intense it might just catch fire. -- Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
The many voices of Brutes tell the reader seductive, dangerous stories about the lives of girls and women in Florida. Lyrical, propulsive, and at times savagely funny, this is an impressive debut by Dizz Tate, and it sucked me in from start to finish. -- Alix Ohlin, author of We Want What We Want
