Drawing on original reporting, years of conversations with survivors, and her own life story, Percy explores the surprising ways in which responses to sexual violence are shaped by both evolutionary instinct and gendered scripts. She takes on taboo subjects—orgasms during assault, sexual promiscuity, female rage, freezing and passivity—illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviance or consent, rather than brilliant acts of self-preservation.
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.
