Book Review: Brutes

Brutes
By Dizz Tate
Review by Rosa

I found Brutes to be like one of those hazy dreams where you wake up disoriented, understanding the vague outline but unsure about how all the pieces fit together. However, through blurring together nostalgia, growing pains, trauma and memory, mysterious elements of a missing girl and swampy lake and the technicolour setting of Falls Landing, Florida – squalid yet enchanting – Dizz Tate uses this sense of bewilderment to convey the weird, gritty and violent sides of girlhood ; ruthlessness, obsession and fine line between watching and being watched. Telling the story of a group of 13 year old girls, Brutes is told predominantly in the collective ‘we’ of oppressive teen clique-iness, all seven characters shifting and morphing into one shared identity – curious and unsupervised, both innocent and straight-up feral. I found the haziness of Brutes to be alluring and confusing, a very valid representation of girlhood.