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A review by illustrated_librarian
Brutes by Dizz Tate
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
2.0
It's a familiar story: a young girl has gone missing. Sammy is a preacher's daughter gone off the rails (she cut her hair short) and the whole town of Falls Landing, Florida, is trying to track her down. No one thinks to ask the gaggle of younger girls who worship Sammy with wide-eyed ferocity, roaming the town like a flock of birds. Whatever they know it'll stay with them for the rest of their lives, long after they escape Falls Landing - if they do.
First person plural narration, voyeurism, fame-hungriness, suburbia being weird, and girlhood? On paper, this is so my kind of book.
The strength of this novel was in the group of girls and the vividly painted Florida setting. Tate conjures a land of tacky condos, polluted swamp-like lakes and faceless strip malls, all pervaded by the smells of hot oil and melting plastic. In the chorus style chapters the girls act as a many-limbed mass with the occasional individual girl taking charge, creating a pov that's somehow both motion-blurred and sharp. Through them, Tate shows how you can be close to extremely dark and troubling happenings as a child, but not fully perceive or process them until years later, if ever.
These effective chorus chapters are interspersed with chapters from the girls as women, giving brief snapshots of what their lives became. I can see what Tate is reaching for here, asking if you can ever truly escape that small town you hate (or avoid becoming just like your mother), however, the execution didn't land. The adult vignettes are too short, not as insightful as they think they are, and the number of them cluttered the overall narrative.
Everything starts strong but begins to fizzle out. There are whole sections when it's unclear who is talking, why we care, or even when a scene is set, and some speculative elements get thrown in that I found frankly baffling. Rather than feeling hazy and immersive it just feels messy, flailing and glancing off the many themes without achieving anything compelling by the end. I think Tate's prose style has promise, but this needed to be a more finely honed narrative to succeed.
First person plural narration, voyeurism, fame-hungriness, suburbia being weird, and girlhood? On paper, this is so my kind of book.
The strength of this novel was in the group of girls and the vividly painted Florida setting. Tate conjures a land of tacky condos, polluted swamp-like lakes and faceless strip malls, all pervaded by the smells of hot oil and melting plastic. In the chorus style chapters the girls act as a many-limbed mass with the occasional individual girl taking charge, creating a pov that's somehow both motion-blurred and sharp. Through them, Tate shows how you can be close to extremely dark and troubling happenings as a child, but not fully perceive or process them until years later, if ever.
These effective chorus chapters are interspersed with chapters from the girls as women, giving brief snapshots of what their lives became. I can see what Tate is reaching for here, asking if you can ever truly escape that small town you hate (or avoid becoming just like your mother), however, the execution didn't land. The adult vignettes are too short, not as insightful as they think they are, and the number of them cluttered the overall narrative.
Everything starts strong but begins to fizzle out. There are whole sections when it's unclear who is talking, why we care, or even when a scene is set, and some speculative elements get thrown in that I found frankly baffling. Rather than feeling hazy and immersive it just feels messy, flailing and glancing off the many themes without achieving anything compelling by the end. I think Tate's prose style has promise, but this needed to be a more finely honed narrative to succeed.