brutes by dizz tate | book review

Brutes by Dizz Tate

Published on February 7, 2023 by Catapult

Genres: Contemporary Fiction

Pages: 304

Format: Kindle

Add to Goodreads

Buy on Amazon

★★★★★

In Falls Landing, Florida - a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers - something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they uncover will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the 'we' of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.

---

“We refused to be cordial. We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones.”

Wow. Just wow. This book has perhaps one of the most engaging and unique writing styles that I have read in long time, blurring prose and action like paint and water across a thick, pebbled slab of paper.

This book follows a group of young teenage girls and their pack-like, herd-like tendencies as they navigate society, complex maternal relationships, the injustice of a world built on misogyny, and the eerie obsession of a cooler, older girl.

The chapters change various perspectives, hopping between girls in the friend group and between the past and future. We see them young and obsessed, and we see them old and as burned out as their mothers were when they were young.

They begin to hyperfixate on Sammy, watching her every move, wanting to be her, shocked when she defies their expectations of her. But then Sammy disappears and the girls watch as the town becomes abuzz with the news with a sort of bizarre apathy and objectiveness, leaving the reader wondering if they know what happened to her. What happens when obsession goes too far and bleeds into indissoluble action?

With each chapter and each new point-of-view, the pages are filled with paragraphs and paragraphs of monologue that seem to share the same, hive-like voice. Tate's constant use of the pronoun "we" creates the sense that the friend group is one amorphous blob acting in fluid, synchronized movements, rather than a collection of individuals. It also gives the sense that despite the chapter being in one person's perspective, we might as well be in the heads of all of them. By the end of the story, the reader knows just as much about each of the girls as we did at the start of the story, unable to differentiate between the members.

“We thought of our hair like our magic trick. At night, when we met up on the playground after dinner, we let our hair down like a show, sprung it out of our ponytails and buns, let our braids fall over our eyes like a beaded curtain we could coyly peek through. We hid our faces because we were certain that someday, someone else would reveal them back to us, tuck our hair behind our ears and tell us how beautiful we were, had been all along, in secret. None of us could believe Sammy had hacked off her curtain, revealed herself by choice.”

This book discusses the graphic, animalistic features of girlhood that are unavoidable: the internal hatred and constant games of comparison, the blossoming from girl to woman, the way our insecurities can morph into misplaced obsessions and subsequent dislike of other girls that we want to be and can't help but hate because we are not her.

I sometimes think society views the maturation of girls beneath a misogynistic lens. Even now in this review I describe it as "the blossoming from girl to woman." But I think this makes it seem like girls are fragile, weak, delicate things. It brings a sense of expected beauty to something that isn't beautiful. Society expects us to be graceful and feminine, placing us in these boxes and shaming us when our lanky limbs fall outside the lines.

What is beautiful about the feeling of our thighs and arms and stomach spilling out of our clothing? What is beautiful about the heat in our wombs as we bleed each month? What is beautiful about being so beautiful that a man thinks we are something to possess and finds ways to steal that sense of beauty from us in irreparable ways?

“We all knew the measures of our thighs exactly, knew them at their best (when we sucked in and stood tall in front of the mirror until we saw a gap) and at their worst (when we sat on the school bus and our skin swamped out like boxed mashed potato when we added the water).”

Tate challenges this concept of female fragility and beauty. Her characters are raw, unfiltered, a hyperbole of every female cliché. They are angry. They are broken. They are cruel in a society that doesn't accept female coldness. They are brutes. They will not let themselves be small enough to be trapped in the boxes in which society places them.

This book also comments on the voyeuristic and exhibitionistic nature of girlhood. We are used to being watched--by men and by other girls--but there is an unspoken rule of not acknowledging that we know we are being watched.

We can see this in Sammy and her friend Mia, who are both the targets of the main characters' obsessions. The group of girls watches and observes Sammy and Mia, and eventually Sammy and Mia notice.

A part of me wonders if Sammy's disappearance was a result of her not wanting to be watched anymore. Growing up as a tele-evangelist's daughter, and by being the focal point of the girls, she's always watched and she feels like she has no control over her life. This is contrasted with the girls' lives, who have too much control and not a close enough relationship with their parents.

The city's investigation into Sammy's disappearances makes the girls, who have always desired to be the observed rather than the observers, see for the first time the downside of being observed and seen and noticed.

“To be loved was just to be watched, or in my case, to imagine you are loved is to imagine you are watched all the time. I preened. I strutted. I imagined he was obsessed with me and so I was obsessed with myself.”

There are themes of adolescence and the discovery of relationships with men. I can see someone not enjoying this book because it feels as if this book paints men in an animalistic and inhumane way, as angry creatures. It's as if there are underlying tones of, "All men suck." But I can't help but find myself relating to this sentiment, because beneath this hateful rhetoric is always a woman's rage. Rage at the countless generations of mothers and sisters being viewed as lesser and inferior to men. Rage at everything from being catcalled to being molested. Rage at our sense of powerlessness.

And since the women in this book are also painted as animals, as brutes, I feel as if it's only fair that the men are as well. The men are what turned the women into this.

“For a long time, I didn’t understand why, but now I think that to humiliate a woman is the only way some men know how to love one.”

This book also dives into the complex relationship between mothers and daughters--mothers who are as new in this world as their offspring and daughters who carry the scars of their mother's trauma; mothers who are jealous of their daughters' beauty and daughters who will do anything to not become like their mothers but eventually will; mothers and daughters who share the same rage and end up directing it at each other when the true enemy is something else.

“We think of our mothers when we love them the most, which is always just after we hate them the most.”

These girls view their mothers as confusing yet simple creatures, as dismissive caretakers who couldn't care less about their daughters. They cannot view their mothers as being once daughters, and they can't see themselves as turning into mothers themselves, saying, "It seemed false and complicated to us, this multiplication of mothers. Our mothers could not also be daughters, just as we would never be mothers.”

I found myself reflecting on my own relationship with my mother and how, as a young girl, I idolized her. When she and my father fought, I always took her side because we were both girls and because my relationship with my father was sour.

Growing up and maturing comes with the realization that my mother isn't perfect and that she also has unresolved trauma that she has yet to untangle. Sometimes there are feelings of confusion when I think that there are things I have figured out about life that she hasn't, because as someone who journals, I'm always analyzing and overthinking and diving deep into my psyche in ways that I can't ever imagine her doing.

Tate was able to put these feelings down on paper in a way that felt raw to me. There were times where I asked myself, "Is this story about me?"

“We clutch our glasses, squint into the light so we cannot see, so we can pretend we still find our mothers beautiful. We have to pretend this, because if we cannot think of them as beautiful, then we have to admit that neither do we think of them as good. And then what would we be? What is a mother or a daughter who is not beautiful or good? We have never heard such a story and we hope we never will.”

Sometimes I got so lost in these themes that I forgot the original premise of the book and wondered what happened to Sammy.

The ending was confusing, to say the least, and even now as I write this review I am trying to figure out what the meaning was or what exactly happened. I'm not even sure if there is supposed to be an actual meaning or if Tate meant to only depict the surreal nature of girlhood and childhood that can't quite be explained and is nothing but a foggy mirage in our memories.

I know this book will be one that sticks with me for a long time, and that I'll be trying to figure out the ending for months to come.

“Our mothers call us brutes when they want us to feel bad. It is what they call men they do not like, like our dads.”