Elegant ... Tate’s work takes a sanctioned vision of suburbia and transforms it ... Tate uses these timeworn questions as a springboard for a larger examination of trauma and memory. But right when I thought I could predict this novel’s arc, it surprised me ... A creative leap with manifold payoffs, heightening the book’s ambition ... By the end, Brutes feels wonderfully untethered, wild and unpredictable. The novel is an exploration of adolescent trauma and its otherworldly manifestations rather than a retelling of a trope.
This isn't a book primarily concerned with finding Sammy. Instead, Tate sidesteps the missing girl trope and makes the far more compelling choice to focus her lens on a pack of 13-year-old girls who are used to blending into the background ... In plunging the reader into the girls' collective perspective, Brutes makes for an original and stylistically ambitious take on the well-trodden subject matter of girls in peril ... Tate perfectly captures the simultaneous impatience and mercurial swings of girlhood ... Fast-forwards ominously color the action of the novel's present ... Tate adds depth and welcome weirdness to what might have been a more ordinary nightmare.
In truth Brutes is not an easy read. But it is an impressive one, thanks to Tate’s almost frightening powers of description. It has been a long time since I read a novel that so viscerally evoked a feeling of place ... Brutes’s narrative structure is complex and often taxing: this is a novel that rewards rereading. The girls’ collective voice switches between before and after Sammy goes missing, and is interspersed with the girls’ grown-up individual narratives. Tate’s experience as a short-story writer comes out in full force here ... With its plot twists, grotesque horror and cartoonish villains, Brutes is a novel that refuses to be reasonable. That’s part of its unsettling charm. But as the shock of the ending wears off, it’s the humid atmosphere of Florida that will stay with you, the smell of rotting food and a contaminated lake. It’s an astonishing debut that will burrow under your skin.
Brutes is heavily character-driven, focusing on the girls’ experiences and their emotional repression surrounding mothers, friends, and their depressed, attention-hungry town. Dizz Tate’s voice in her debut novel is voyeuristic, unsettling, and mesmerizing ... Tate’s striking depiction of growing up in Florida is so palpable that, as a Midwesterner, it was easy to be immersed in the beautiful and oftentimes depressing setting ... Small interactions and mannerisms make Brutes realistic and sometimes comedic. Being so vivid and candid, it brought to mind universal experiences of overhearing conversations between strangers ... The last quarter of the novel is its unraveling point, coming to some odd conclusions that leave some questions open to interpretation. All things considered, I found myself invested in the relatable, intimate moments that molded the girls ... Stunning and realistic, Brutes speaks to how we have been taught to stifle emotions out of fear and how those fears have been weaponized against us, resulting in anger acting as the secondary emotion that masks all others.
In this slippery debut where much is difficult to pin down, Tate acutely captures the precariousness of girlhood, its growing pains and what it is to be 'born out of rage'.
Tate plays with the horror film imagery our brains have learned to expect ... Where does allusion tip over into derivativeness? ... Readers might wonder if she’s crossed that line. I’d rebut the publisher’s claim that Brutes is 'wildly original'. Still, no one could accuse it of being short on atmosphere, or indeed action, which keeps coming with increasingly frenzied incoherence ... It’s a shame because Tate has talent in spades. She moves deftly between narrative voices, conjures striking similes...slyly observes social tensions and captures the agonies of youthful yearning. What feels bracingly true here is her unsentimental vision of girlhood as grubby, vicious and tribal, and her depiction of adolescent hierarchies and herd instincts ... After a promising start, she tries to cram in too much, and a bewildering arsenal of horror cliches has the numbing effect of a line of trick-or-treaters leaping out at you, swathed in white sheets. Next time, less is more.
Teenage girlhood is a special kind of hell, one that is expressed with precision and claustrophobia in Dizz Tate’s debut novel ... Tate’s writing is expressive and sharp as the girls navigate a world that now perceives them as women ... Occasionally, the narrative lurches a little heavily into timeworn tropes, but Brutes is an impressive, atmospheric debut, told with stylish ferocity.
Electric, experimental, at times hard to follow ... Ideas such as desire, idolatry, and the exploitation of such desire and idolatry are touched on over and over ... But many of the book’s central threads felt confusing, and unresolved. Horror elements, such as a mysterious lake creature, are brought forth, but don’t explain enough. Instead, the work comprises a series of allusions, nods, winks, to something too indirect to decode. Full of intrigue and intensity, Brutes smoulders but doesn’t quite catch fire.
Tension between the group and the individual propels the novel forward. The girls test the boundaries of their own pain, experiences that are necessarily individual, even when witnessed by the other members of the group ... Brutes resembles what Eugenides’ novel might have been like from the Lisbon girls’ perspective: that of the inscrutable subject turning the lens outward and becoming the watcher ... Confronts the weird, the gross, and the downright bizarre truths of adolescence. In its depiction of girlhood, Brutes eschews the sugar-and-spice trope in favor of split earlobes from a botched piercing, of hiding dead wasps in their mothers’ purses, of an ominous creature lurking in the lake.
Brutes sets itself up as a sort of Gen Z response to Eugenides’s tale of male obsession (The Virgin Suicides is cited on all the publicity material). Its girlier, nastier chorus believe in horror more than they believe in beauty. They growl and spit and howl and snap ... The idea is interesting and timely—if only Tate had stuck to the point. As well as the 'girl gone missing' storyline, it’s also a collective coming-of-age saga, touches on grooming in Hollywood, and there is a final descent into the supernatural through a 'monster' that lurks in the lake ... where her prose shines is in its descriptions of the ragged, hollowed-out landscape of its west coast...And she conveys well America’s distinctive mix of gaudy capitalism and zealous faith ... Often, though, the writing becomes overblown ... This is Tate’s first novel and she has yet to find her feet in the form.
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.
Brutes offers stark and unlovely characterizations, but with moments of striking beauty. The girls (and their mothers) are grasping, even desperate, but capable of compassion. Tate's Florida is steamy and thickly rank, with blinding sunlight and shadowy depths, not least in the lake that many residents believe houses a monster--maybe the monster that took Sammy, although the human monsters in this community are plenty sinister. This is a dark coming-of-age tale and meditation on childhood and the cusp of adolescence: authentic, often grim, but with glimmers of hope.
Dreamlike ... 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.
