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.
Riveting, heartrending ... Percy’s subject is brutal, but her writing allays some of the impact by being almost impossibly beautiful: crisp, vulnerable, lyrical ... Girls Play Dead illuminates how stories can trap people, how the impulse to rewrite a violation or rescue an abuser leads us away from the truth. But Percy also seems to feel that showing us the texture and shared features of human experience might be the crucial thing that can make a difference.
A documentation of the casual and caustic ways women can be betrayed by men ... Percy’s achievement in narrating these women’s remarkable acts of survival (hers included), which for too long have been misrepresented or discounted, is a lasting one, for which she should be celebrated ... But it lacks the kind of momentum that comes from fully developing an argument or conveying the arc of a personal awakening.
I am moved by the way Percy’s own PTSD informed the storytelling in Girls Play Dead. The curiosity, searching for patterns in her reporting, finding recognition in other’s stories, and circling back to the self, her own memory. The structure of the book mirrors the intricacy of a mind healing, not by any means linear. Girls Play Dead doesn’t ask why abuse happens, but how we survive violation, how we respond to fear, and how we tell our stories.
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.
