The Red Word is an intelligent, thoughtful and dark analysis of rape culture as it exists today on college campuses around North America. Karen lives with a group of radical feminists, and yet somehow ends up in a relationship with a fraternity boy whose frat house is nicknamed "Gang Bang Central." Not oblivious to the irony of the situation, Karen tries to strike a balance between her sweet relationship with one of the brothers, and her more edgy connection to her sisterhood of roommates. The Red Word captures the binary experience of college life as a woman, and the complicated relationships that are formed in early adulthood that shape us throughout our lives. I absolutely loved it and can't wait to read more by Henstra.

Going into this novel, I had to brace myself, because I knew I was in for graphic imagery on a subject that's so hard to deal with. Sarah definitely approached rape in an honest, yet respectful way.

What I liked about this book was that it's about such a hard topic, but you are left intrigued by it because we can all relate to it on some degree. The characters are all interesting with their beliefs, actions, and future goals. They were all very well written and the plot was interesting as well. We flip from present-day, adult Karen to 90s Karen in America. The use of Greek mythology was somewhat lost on me though - I could never catch on to them, so definitely brush up on this before you dive into The Red Word!

At times it was a bit wordy, and I felt like it dragged on at parts, so for this reason I think you should proceed with caution. This book is not for just anyone; although it's a topic many of us can relate to, it does require thought and your full attention when reading (it's not a book you can just breeze quickly through!)

I knew this wasn't a book that I was going to enjoy. I knew that going in, by reading the publisher's description. Just seeing the words "rape culture", I knew heavy, uncomfortable, stuff lay ahead of me.

The story is Karen's. She's looking back to the 1990's, when she was a Canadian exchange student at an American university, straddling two worlds: being the girlfriend of a frat boy at Gamma Beta Chi (aka "Gang Bang Central"), and the roommate of a group of lesbian feminists in a house nicknamed "Raghurst". She wants desperately to belong to both. This provides the story, of course, because through her, we see both the problems in the fraternity and the lengths her roommates will go to expose them.

It's an important story to tell, and the importance is elevated by the integration of classical themes. Mythology meshes with reality. A Greek chorus interrupts the narrative every so often, reminding us this story is not new. This story goes back to the ancients. My eyes widened and I was reminded of this sinister danger, this subconscious malevolence that humans have carried for centuries, fed by our collective and cultural stories.

So yes, an important story. However, my problems with the book stem from being unconvinced. I was not convinced that Karen wanted to belong to either of these worlds. Her relationship with her boyfriend Mike is lukewarm at best. Her fascination with Bruce, the golden Adonis of the fraternity, is weak. She's obsessed with his body, but it doesn't seem like enough to justify her walking the dangerous halls of GBC. Same goes for the Raghurst women. They are reckless, self-important, know-it-alls. She follows them around ga-ga much of the time, admiring them and wanting their approval, but I didn't understand why. The author doesn't make any of them likeable, and doesn't demonstrate a bond that would explain Karen's link to them.

I couldn't help but compare this book with Donna Tartt's The Secret History: both share the campus setting, the unlikable characters, the drinking and drug use, the classical themes always there, between the lines. Even the idolising of the professor. But Tartt succeeds where Henstra doesn't, by winning me over to the group, showing me their complex friendships, making me understand their motivations. She even made me root for them to get away with murder.

Karen's story is interesting, and brings up a lot of challenging thoughts about gender politics and the surprising nature of victimisation. There is a lot of Women's Studies rhetoric here. However, again, I was not convinced of the motivation of certain characters, nor did I find the reaction to the main traumatic event very believable. On the other hand, one could say Henstra isn't trying to make it easy on us. Victims aren't always likeable, or even easy to spot, and their actions are not always something we can identify with.

The Red Word , while absorbing and readable, is over-the-top, sort of like a Greek myth. Perhaps the author has succeeded at her goal. She's written a modern day myth, only this one undercuts what most of us know from mythology - and while that was problematic to me in a novel, it's still something to be celebrated.

I really wanted to love this book, and I did like a lot about it! It reads almost as a kind of Field Guide to Feminism in the sense that there is a lot of feminist theory blended into the narrative, and I think this is one of the things the book does well: it asks you to consider the utility of theory in the real world. Or at least the book problematizes the relationship between the academic discourse of theory and the lived experiences of women. I also really enjoyed how Sarah Henstra framed the book around greek myths, both in the literal structure of the narrative and in the plot itself. This was a really interesting element of the book. I think we're supposed to read the book itself as a myth? Or maybe a narrative the mimics some of the classic elements of greek mythology? I'm not quite sure, but if this is the case, I think the book did some really fantastic work along these lines. This feels like it would be a great book to teach in an academic setting given how well it blends fiction and theory.

One of my complaints about the book was that I had a hard time understanding a lot of the characters. Their motivations and reactions often mystified me, but again, I wonder if this isn't the point, especially in a novel that examines rape culture and its many victims. I often didn't buy into how particular characters responded to trauma, but this is also one of the themes of the narrative: how trauma disrupts concepts of what is reasonable or expected or acceptable.

The other issues I had were small. The book shifts between past and present, though most of the book (probably around 70%) takes place in the past. I often forgot about the present storyline entirely, which was okay for me because I was primarily invested in Karen's time at Raghurst.

Though I struggled with some sections of this book, it has given me a lot to think about. It feels like an important book, one that people should read.

I didn't take any Women's Studies courses in college, and feel that reading this book has filled in a bit of that gap for me. Main character Karen is an impressionable young college student, who moves into a house full of upperclasswomen who seem to collectively be in charge of Feminism on campus, and joins in their idolization of a particular women's studies professor. At the same time, Karen also has a major crush on Bruce Comfort, the BMOC at frat house Gamma Beta Chi, where she is girlfriend to a different guy named Mike. I don't know if I've ever read a character as deftly developed as Sarah Henstra's Karen (I loved how proud she was of her experience working at a logging camp, and of her wits and smarts, and her skills as a photographer) who ends up confounding me so completely throughout a novel. I wasn't really clear on what was so great about the women's studies prof, or why she was dating Mike, or how she could be so blinded by Bruce's beauty, or why she was involved with a fraternity at all, considering what a GDI she seemed to be (that's what we non-Greeks used to be called at the University of Wisconsin).

While I'll admit this was an interesting read, a lot of alcohol and drugs factored in to the plot, in a very off-hand sort of way that I would think is beneath an actual college professor. I found the bits of Greek chorus narration to be a little jarring and precocious, "O blessings upon these tiled white rooms with their subdivided pools of curtain quiet!", the bloody gruesome plot-twist seemed B-movie to me, and I wish the flashbacks to present day had proven a bit more enlightening.

Disclaimer: Though I personally found some elements of this novel to be less than great, I would've actively discourage people from reading the book. I know people who would enjoy this. I just wasn't one of them, sadly.

This was an interesting twenty pages. Though I enjoyed the prose and found the group dynamics interesting, I'm concerned about some of the elements I found in the book. My main concern is what happens on page 9, when after students ran an ad about a roommate needing to be "queer friendly". The main character reflects that she'd always assumed queer was a slur, and something rednecks would shout out. No mention or reflection about queer being reclaimed for self-identification.

Yes, this book is written through the less of the main character, who I assume will have a learning arc throughout the book. But some of the prose and general discussion of campus life made me concerned that the author doesn't understand the current campus climate. I'm not talking about the general book description: THAT is certainly realistic, and why I wanted to read the book in the first place. The protagonist apparently doesn't understand, either, which gives the book an air of inaccuracy.

Other concerns included a character saying "Heil Hitler" as a joke after being asked to contribute to the grocery fund. Nope.

Sadly, I'm going to DNF this one.

Henstra's upcoming book deals with rape (The Red Word) on college campus. A frought subject, the author attempts to balance the scales by juxtaposing the world of a fraternity known for sexism and sexual assault with radical, sometimes violent feminism and attempts to humanize the rapist central to the narrative. For me, I find the people-are-wrong-on-both-sides approach to systemic violence against women to be infuriating and, therefore, I did not finish or appreciate this book.