Captivating but occasionally convoluted ... The violent stories in the first half of Girls Play Dead make for grim but critical reading ... Percy’s writing is consistently lovely, even when her subject is almost unbearably dark ... But the power and poise of the prose are liabilities as well as assets: Percy is so mesmeric a stylist that the elegance of her elliptical writing can obscure its conceptual clumsiness ... The latter half of Girls Play Dead is no longer about girls playing dead in the wake of sexual violence. Instead, it billows into a more amorphous exploration.
Riveting and provocative ... It’s a dark subject, but Percy’s lyrical prose and skilled storytelling make even the most harrowing sequences read like a novel ... Poignant ... These are stories that many women will recognize ... Part of what makes Girls Play Dead so good — and so different from much other journalism on this subject — is that Percy is not telling readers what to think.
With an immense capacity for empathy and nuance, journalist and author Percy examines the challenging subjects of rape and sexual assault ... A compassionate exploration of the history of assault against women.
