We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones.
In Falls Landing, Florida, theme parks number in the dozens under a blisteringly eternal hot sun, pink bougainvillea flowers burn and cherry pies shimmer with roaches. Brutes revolves around the disappearance of a TV preacher's daughter and the gang of thirteen-year-old girls who have obsessively orbited her. They see the world through their binoculars, and they know everything.
Told with a striking voice that captures the collective violences, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood, Brutes is about when what you know as "we" breaks that collective "we" forever. It is a classic, virtuoso coming-of-age story - one that depicts the crucible of young female invincibility and vulnerability.
We smile. We shimmer. We feel like we do not exist.