Harare Review of Books

304 pages.

Expected publication date: Feb 7, 2023.

Genre: Fiction/Weird.

It’s been a while since I finished a novel in one day, and I want answers. This will be difficult to review without giving the book away, but here’s my attempt.

Do you remember your girlhood, the ‘we’-ness of it, the way young girls meld into each other because they don’t want to be alone? This book brought that back so powerfully for me. A group of thirteen-year-olds spend their days watching (and it’s as creepy as anything you can imagine) the goings-on in their town at the edge of a lake. They watch the slightly older girl, Sammy, that they have a girl-crush on; they watch Mia, the frightening girl they envy, who’s Sammy’s friend; and they watch Eddie, the boy they love, who once belonged to them, and who chose Mia over Sammy.

There’s a divide in town: those who live in the apartments, and those who live in a gated community, behind a tall white wall. The girls are hungry, in the way all children are, to know what’s behind it. Their mothers seem to drift about (reminiscent of the parents in Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible), working, drinking, smoking, despairing of their girls (the Brutes), and mourning their men. And there seems to be a monster in the lake.

This is a rather complex novel that doesn’t explain much, and wants you to read between the lines. It evoked for me so many deep memories of, and feelings about, girlhood, and the author’s use of “we” in the sections where the girls narrate manages to make the slight craziness of it really extrememly creepy. (Spoiler and content warning) That creepiness isn’t just about childhood, though; one of the monsters in the book is child sexual abuse.

The strength of Brutes, for me, is in the amosphere the author created, which is extremely powerful, like those mood films. Part of that atmosphere comes from the evocation of place, in the warm, steamy, dreamy strangeness of Florida; but it is also very much in the way Tate grouped people together (the children, the mothers, the envied older kids, etc), making those groups characters themselves.

I would classify this book as Weird fiction, but the particular subgroup that contains the work of women about girlhood/womanhood: writers like Karen Russell (St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves), Kim Fu (Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century), and the like (—here’s a Goodreads list to get you going). I love this kind of fiction—but be warned, not everyone does.

Thank you to Megan Fishmann, and to Catapult, for this ARC.

---

You can support independent bookshops, and my writing, by buying these books on Bookshop:

Brutes | A Children’s Bible | St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves | Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century