REVIEWS
Unearthed teenage secrets and inconvenient truths
The dead or missing girl theme has truly been wrung out for all it’s worth. From shows like True Detective and novels like Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, there is a morbid cultural fascination that focuses on the deaths of young white women, using their bodies as a narrative structure.
Dizz Tate’s Brutes may begin with the panic over Sammy the missing preacher’s daughter, but the world of Tate’s debut novel blossoms around this cliched trope – opening up a kaleidoscopic image of overlapping teen girlhoods. In the recollections of suburban Florida, the reader enters a world imbued with small-town mysticism and the quickly fading naivety of young minds.
Through the eyes of a gang of misfit girls and their singular male friend Christian, we see the lives of the group change over one summer. Together they form an amorphous mass, collective mind of desire and insecurity but brimming with knowledge. The events
