Brutes

DANYA KUKAFKA, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"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."

KRISTEN MARTIN, NPR

"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."