Brutes

September 1, 2022

From Ad�b�yọ̀, author of the Baileys short-listed Stay with Me, A Spell of Good Things brings together two contemporary Nigerian families through the intertwined lives of a young woman doctor and a boy tending to his family after his father's death. Perennially best-selling Deveraux's Meant To Be features two sisters in 1970s Kansas who must between what they want and what is expected of them (75,000-copy first printing). Though she finally feels at home at her prestigious college in 1998, Lower East Side New Yorker Isabel Rosen still faces emotional crisis in Florin's My Last Innocent Year, moving from a nonconsensual sexual encounter to an affair with a married professor; a highly touted debut (100,000-copy first printing). In Ghanaian British George's debut, Maame, Maddie finally wrests some independence from her parents--a bossy mother forever traveling to Ghana and a father who needs caretaking--and for the first time experiences living on her own; then tragedy strikes (250,000-copy first printing). In Pulitzer Prize finalist Makkai's I Have Some Questions for You, film professor and podcaster Bodie Kane gingerly returns to teach at the New Hampshire boarding school where a classmate was murdered and begins to wonder whether justice was served in convicting the school's athletic trainer, Omar Evans. When Melinda's husband runs off with a young celebrity entrepreneur, they dump their newborn on Melinda's doorstep, and she ends up caring for the baby with friend Lauren, whose Greenwich Village brownstone houses a bar called The Sweet Spot, and bartender Olivia; from popular Musical Chairs author Poeppel. Winner of the Bristol Short Story Prize, Florida-born, London-based Tate goes full-length in Brutes, about a bunch of 13-year-old girls in swampy Falls Landing, FL, obsessed with preacher's daughter Sammy--and galvanized by her disappearance.

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November 15, 2022
A group of tween girls in Florida moves through the aftermath of the disappearance of one of their own. "Women notice everything," writes Tate in her dreamlike debut novel, and the same is true of the half-dozen or so girls (and one queer boy) in Falls Landing, Florida, who narrate much of the novel en masse, in a blurry first-person plural. They watch from the windows of their apartments and hidden up in trees, through binoculars and from the edges of lawns and highways. As the story begins, one of them has gone missing, and they watch as the search party unfolds for Sammy Liu-Lou, the preacher's daughter. Sammy is not like the other girls, richer, older, and somehow lonelier. She shaves off the "curtain" of hair that all the girls maintain to keep from being seen too closely. She sneaks out at night to meet neighborhood boys. She doesn't seem to be obsessed with fame and fortune the way the other girls are, tempted to audition at the local mall for an outfit called Star Search. As the search party accelerates their hunt for Sammy, the girls keep all of the things they've noticed in Falls Landing--all the town's secrets--to themselves, with catastrophic results. Though most of the novel is written from the collective point of view of the girls, Tate intercuts the main narrative with some short chapters from adult versions of individual girls, all of them in various stages of imploding their own lives. These offer welcome reprieves from the cool veneer of the collective narration, which feels both conceptually satisfying but emotionally aloof, until everything--structure, story, and sense--shatters apart at the novel's climax. Tate's novel feels a bit like avant-garde fashion: surreal, impractical, but beautiful to see. A promising first book whose enigmatic nature is both frustrating and alluring.

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November 1, 2022
When the preacher's daughter goes missing, gossip reverberates throughout a small Florida town, where something lurks beneath the lake. A group of young girls, deemed "brutes" by their mothers, are the only ones in Falls Landing who know where Sammy is. She is the object of their obsession; they teeter between love and hate, jealousy and kinship. The details of Sammy's disappearance slowly unfold only as their joint perspective allows. As the story fast-forwards to years after Sammy's disappearance, the pack continues to be haunted by the darkness of their childhood. Brutes will appeal to readers of Dantiel Moniz's Milk Blood Heat (2021), another Florida gothic that similarly depicts young girls toeing the line between cruelty and kindness. Tate's debut novel is for readers looking for a riveting plot only topped by its captivating voices, at times honest and vulnerable, at others chilling in their detachment. Tate's prose enhances the conspiratorial relationship of these characters bonded by fickle friendship pacts, violence, and love. Simultaneously disturbing and sentimental, Brutes is a true reflection of girlhood.

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November 21, 2022
Tate’s uneven debut tracks an ensemble cast of teenage girls who long to escape their suffocating hometown of Falls Landing, Fla. After cool older girl Sammy disappears, a group of 13-year-olds who’d obsessed over her wonder what happened. Chapters alternate perspectives, including that of chorus-like entries from the girls’ collective point of view as well as individual narrators such as Isabel, one of the girls’ mothers, who describes the nightmarish landscape defined by toxic lakes, alligators, and hurricanes (“The light fades and the whole place just looks like something about to die”). Hazel, one of the girls, delivers alarming lines inflected by philosophy: “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that even movement becomes another kind of stillness if you force it to last too long.” While the language has mesmerizing moments, the repetitiveness of the first-person plural passages blunt the impact: “We shook our bangled wrists... we didn’t know what it meant... we were in the mood where nothing was going to make us happy.” As the girls look for Sammy, they also dream about appearing on a talent show and finding fame in Los Angeles. The finale’s murky, and the author leans a bit too much on the missing-girl trope. It’s an often beautiful work, but it’s also exhausting.