Review: "Brutes" by Dizz Tate

Brutes by Dizz Tate
Published February 2023 via Catapult
★★★

2.5 stars? I don't really know what to make of this. In Brutes, a pack of young girls runs wild through the Florida suburbs. Brutes, their mothers call them, as they tease and taunt and torment, as they use their scorn and their soulless stares to keep each other in line and outsiders uneasy. Brutes, their mothers call them, but I think I would go with feral.

Most of the novel is told in the first person plural: we. The occasional chapter brings us into something closer to the present day, when these feral children have grown up to be marginally less feral but no more happy adults; those adult chapters are told from individual perspectives, but because the girls are so closely enmeshed in their younger years, they are hard to tell apart even as first-person-singular adults. As children, they are obsessed with a somewhat older girl, Sammy, and with the search to find Sammy, who has gone missing from her bedroom and cannot be found. Has she been murdered in the nearby building site, drowned in the lake, abducted by a stranger? If the girls, who aim to see everything while others underestimate them, know anything, they're not saying. They're too busy directing fire ants towards their mothers' sandals and practicing seduction and cutting every single other person they meet down to size.

There's something rotten in the state of Florida, and that rot permeates every part of these girls' lives. Only late in the book do we start to understand what they, too, are starting to understand. I suspect that there's a lot of symbolism and undertone here that I'm missing, and that I would have gotten more from it with a more consistent first-person singular perspective. Even a feral one.