Brutes
Author: Dizz Tate
Published by: Faber & Faber
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
My Rating ★★
Published by: Faber & Faber
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
My Rating ★★
Huddled at a bedroom window, a group of teenagers peer out at their scorched, swampy, fame-hungry town.
Taking turns with the binoculars, their gaze sweeps across the highway and the abandoned construction site to the lake. Figures drift across the landscape: mothers, fathers, a preacher's daughter.
These girls know everything about everyone - perhaps too much.
Taking turns with the binoculars, their gaze sweeps across the highway and the abandoned construction site to the lake. Figures drift across the landscape: mothers, fathers, a preacher's daughter.
These girls know everything about everyone - perhaps too much.
My thoughts:
Brutes is a difficult one to describe. I was so looking forward to reading this and am genuinely disappointed to have not enjoyed it.
It tells the story of a group of thirteen-year-old girls who obsess over their slightly older neighbour, Sammy. When Sammy suddenly goes missing, the whole neighbourhood start searching for her.
These girls function as a co-dependent group, but frustratingly the teenagers’ identities are barely distinguishable from one another. The narrative starts off being told by the group of girls as a collective, rather than just one character. Then this changes as the girls grow up and grow more distant from one another. Whilst the first-person plural narration was an interesting technique, the chapters on each of the group in later life arguably served no real purpose.
What I did enjoy was the imagery and the descriptions of things. Dizz Tate succeeds in creating a world that feels untethered, wild and unpredictable. It is gritty and unsettling. Initially the book feels full of promise and intrigue, but as the book progresses the story loses its comprehensiveness. Flitting between different points of view, points in time & different locations, it loses all sense of its narrative.
I read this for a monthly book club and thankfully found I was not the only one who simply didn’t know what happened here. I’m certainly not against books that lean more towards ‘no plot just vibes,’ but Brutes did not grip me in the way I’d hoped it might. If you’re thinking of reading this, I’d point you towards Mon Awad’s Bunny instead, which is similarly strange, but utterly compelling in ways Brutes just isn’t.
Overall reaction:
Brutes is a difficult one to describe. I was so looking forward to reading this and am genuinely disappointed to have not enjoyed it.
It tells the story of a group of thirteen-year-old girls who obsess over their slightly older neighbour, Sammy. When Sammy suddenly goes missing, the whole neighbourhood start searching for her.
These girls function as a co-dependent group, but frustratingly the teenagers’ identities are barely distinguishable from one another. The narrative starts off being told by the group of girls as a collective, rather than just one character. Then this changes as the girls grow up and grow more distant from one another. Whilst the first-person plural narration was an interesting technique, the chapters on each of the group in later life arguably served no real purpose.
What I did enjoy was the imagery and the descriptions of things. Dizz Tate succeeds in creating a world that feels untethered, wild and unpredictable. It is gritty and unsettling. Initially the book feels full of promise and intrigue, but as the book progresses the story loses its comprehensiveness. Flitting between different points of view, points in time & different locations, it loses all sense of its narrative.
I read this for a monthly book club and thankfully found I was not the only one who simply didn’t know what happened here. I’m certainly not against books that lean more towards ‘no plot just vibes,’ but Brutes did not grip me in the way I’d hoped it might. If you’re thinking of reading this, I’d point you towards Mon Awad’s Bunny instead, which is similarly strange, but utterly compelling in ways Brutes just isn’t.
Overall reaction: