Huddled at a bedroom window, a group of teenagers peer out at their scorched, swampy, fame-hungry town. Taking turns with the binoculars, their gaze sweeps across the highway and the abandoned construction site to the lake. Figures drift across the landscape: mothers, fathers, a preacher's daughter.

These girls know everything about everyone - perhaps too much.

'Beautiful and deeply strange. I absolutely loved it' - Gem, Bookseller

Honestly a tough read and one I'd encourage everyone to check the content warnings for and to be in the right frame of mind to read
It doesn't feel right to say I enjoyed it so, I suppose, I appreciated it is a better reflection of how I felt after reading.

A hard read. It covers many issues including rape, abuse and assault. It wasn’t an easy read but it’ll leave a lasting memory. It’s an unusual style of writing but it flows well.

DNF I wanted to love this book - on the surface it's something right up my street - but I just couldn't get into it. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood when I read it, or maybe this just wasn't for me. I can see this appealing to other people though, the vibe reminded me a little of the virgin suicides. I'd recommend to anyone who likes literary fiction erring on the dark side.

The download date was unfortunately missed, I would be happy to re-review if it became available again. I have awarded stars for the book cover and description as they both appeal to me. I would be more than happy to re-read and review if a download becomes available. If you would like me to re-review please feel free to contact me at thesecretbookreview@gmail.com or via social media The_secret_bookreview (Instagram) or Secret_bookblog (Twitter). Thank you.

Sometimes when you read a book about teens, it takes you back to your own adolescence, the voices in this book seemed so true to that age. The way the girls all acted so sophisticated and yet were so vulnerable, how humiliating they found their Mothers, and the terror of being the common enemy on any given day rang so true. This book will stay with me.

'Brutes' is reminiscent of 'The Virgin Suicides.' It is clammy, intoxicating and mysterious. However, I didn't feel completely convinced by or safe in Tate's writing. The fact that it was a debut was very clear as I felt that Brutes lacked direction and a clear understanding of what it was trying to achieve.

This is a hard one to review. I read this book had many comparisons to the virgin suicides before I went into this and subconsciously it’s all I was looking out for.

Extremely promising author from this debut book. I loved the premise and the way the story was written. Some chunks of the book were more enjoyable than others.

Not a book I’d recommend to everyone but if I know your certain taste in genres then maybe.

In Falls Landing, Florida - a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers - something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they uncover will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

I found this compelling to read but wished there had been a bit more detail and a more satisfying ending.

Strong "The Virgin Suicides" vibes here. A group of teenage girls are obsessed with a pastors daughter who goes missing. The chapters are mostly presented in a "we" chorus voice and the story has a hypnotic, dreamy, hallucinatory feel. Unique and interesting.

What did they really see when Sammy disappeared? Did they know more than want they told parents, the preacher who desperately wanted his daughter back?
An intimate exploration of the relationship between a group of girls on the cusp, of understanding what adulthood may have in store for them.
I loved Tates ability to get into the girls psyche, their attempt to grabble with events to try and make the right decision. The narrative was superb, the ending just perfect.

I struggled with 'Brutes' because I didn't find myself invested in any of the characters. The setting was interesting - and one of the things that enticed me to request an ARC - but I think Tate was trying to rest the plot and feel of the book on the group of girls' relationship/s to each other, and I don't consider this to have worked; it seemed disjointed to me. There were some interesting comments on mother-daughter relationships, as well as the general misery of being a teenage girl, however, which I enjoyed.

Brutes follows the story of a community in Florida, where preacher's daughter Sammy has disappeared. A group of teenage girls who have spent their days obsessively watching Sammy live her life begin to uncover secrets about what really happened to her.

An incredibly gripping book with a powerful story.

I adored the writing in this book, it was exceptionally sharp and well-crafted. There were so many sentences that I highlighted because they were brilliant lines of honesty or perception. I found that the snippets of dark humour provided a much needed spark against the heavy themes.

Dizz Tate has perfectly captured what it means to be a teenager. She has created a brilliant contrast between the group of girls as a collective and the individuals that they grow into as adults.

Overall a great debut novel, I am already looking forward to reading more from this author.

Thank you NetGalley and Faber for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Visceral, powerful and aching with adolescent rage, Brutes is a dizzying ride through the lives of a group of teenage girls living in Florida. The humidity pulses through the page, and the physicality of it is staggering. The story is told largely in a plural first-person narrator - the 'we' of the girls - but it is not an inclusive 'we'. As the reader, you are on the edges, peering in, spying on the girls as they spy on the people around them. There is a sense of being held at a distance and yet, occasionally, you are catapulted bodily into their world with a force that is unsettling. I haven't read anything quite like this before, and it is entirely captivating.

(3.75 stars)

Brutes is an enigmatic, dark, hazy story of teenage obsession, all-consuming friendship, and mythical terrors lurking in the deep. It centres around a group of young girls (and boy) in Falls Landing, Florida with a cult-like loyalty to each other and to the objects of their envy and desire - the popular, attractive, older kids Sammy, Eddie, and Mia - when Sammy suddenly goes missing.

This mysterious tale, reminiscent of Mona Awad's Bunny and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, raises many questions and provides no straightforward answers.

I really enjoyed the writing style and the chapters narrated by the group of protagonists in first-person plural, emphasizing the intensity of their collective desire for love, beauty, fame, and belonging, but also their cruelty and callousness towards their mothers, other kids, and even each other at times. I liked the focus on the teenagers' pursuit of fame and the disturbing, dark reality behind the Star Search pageant that the young people of Falls Landing and their mothers are so desperate to get into. Although I felt that it was not adequately explored, I also enjoyed the vague but creepy sci-fi occurrences and the sense of disorientation they created. I liked that we have to piece all of this together through the fragmented, unreliable narrative.

I did feel that the focus on the collective narrative meant that the central characters in the book, the group of teenagers - Hazel, Isabel, Britney, Christian, Jody, and Leila - were not fleshed out enough, even in their respective solo chapters. I also just would have liked more of the sci-fi/horror elements interspersed throughout the book, as I thought that they added a very intriguing layer.

Overall, though, this is a unique, intense, and thought-provoking story about youth, obsession, and trauma that I'm very excited to see other readers' interpretations of!

Thank you very much to Netgalley and Faber for the ARC!

This is between a pick and a so-so for me but I‘m going to be kind as it‘s a debut novel and i do feel like there's promise there.

Every review I read compared this to The Virgin Suicides and I can see why, with its chorus of young teenagers speaking in the plural first person. It has a real sense of place in steamy Florida, which I loved. However the individual more recent stories of the women didn‘t connect for me, and actually distracted from the underlying menace stalking the young girls‘ neighbourhood. This is where it became a bit Bunny-esque for me, so if you liked that (I didn‘t) you may also like this. It wasn‘t clear whether the women were having flashbacks, seeing real-life monsters or fictional monsters. Or maybe I just didn‘t get it and it was something else entirely! 🤔 in short, loved them as girls, not so much as grown women. now

This coming-of-age story follows a group of homogenous young teenagers, collectively known as the girls, in a period when an older girl they admire goes missing. Has the monster of the lake got her? The story toggles between past and present when the girls have grown up and we learn the fate of each individual. And gradually, the events of the past become clear,
This was a very atmospheric story, full of suspense and hidden danger, with the metaphor of the lake monster adding an air of the supernatural that is never quite banished.
The narrative reminded me of another coming-of-age book, The Virgin Suicides. Like the boys in that story, the girls watch and wait, but also have their part to play in a tragedy that affects them all.
I found it moving, but also quite harrowing in its portrayal of the dangers girls and women face every day. The girls' mothers - themselves a homogenous bunch - often call them brutes, but the real brutality lies in the outside world, from which they can never fully escape.

"We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones."

This is a book that I still don't know how to describe and is still sitting with me. It throws a lot of different elements at you but even when I wasn't sure what was going on I was invested. The collective 'we' used to tell the story from the perspective of the girls friendship group was really effective. It did take me a minute to get used to it and I think the intermittent first person chapters from each of the girls kept the narrative and the pacing fresh. The descriptions of the setting really make you feel the sticky Floridian heat. You get the impression the characters will never quite shake off the place they're from despite the desire throughout for escape. Something I wasn't expecting from this book as well is the dark humour peppered throughout, a favourite being 'Stop with the alligators being rebranded as therapy dogs.' The mystery of Sammy's disappearance kept me engaged throughout as well.

Overall I really enjoyed this, it felt like a fresh new take on the small town missing girl story in that it's not really about that at all/ it's about much more than that.

This book started out very promisingly. A teenage girl, Sammy, goes missing from a lakeside community in Florida. She and her friend Mia are the object of an admiration and fascination bordering on the obsessive for a group of slightly younger girls, who watch them and follow them around. The younger girls form a collective narrator which functions as a Greek chorus, dropping hints of having insider knowledge about her whereabouts whilst reporting events in an idiosyncratic and enigmatic manner.

The narrative takes the form of a series of obscure vignettes giving a snapshot of life in this dysfunctional, bored little community. The missing girl is the local preacher's daughter; her friend Mia the daughter of a single mother who brokers young talent - and more - for a sleazy talent scout. The chorus girls' mothers live lives of quiet desperation masked by drinking and socialising at communal barbecues, calling their collective daughters 'brutes' when they are casually cruel in the way of young teen girls. The nearby lake is black, uninviting, possibly heavily polluted, with rumours of housing a mysterious monstrous creature that are used to scare small children away from the water's edge.

This very intriguing start unfortunately doesn't really develop into anything other than more of the same. With a premise that is fundamentally one of a missing person mystery, there came a point where I wanted to feel that we were moving towards a conclusion, and this doesn't really come. What we do get is perfunctory, and I felt that too many questions were left unanswered. Not all stories need a neat beginning, middle and end, true, but this just became irritating - little snippets that very much failed to add up to either a coherent whole, or gaps that made me think. Lots of ideas could have been developed but were not - the transgender boy in the group of girls, the monster in the lake, the arson-prone brother of the missing girl's boyfriend, the hints of a systematic teen procurement system for the sleazy talent scout (this one did at least go somewhere), and of course the main mystery of Sammy's disappearance. The girls, the brutes of the title, certainly dispel any thoughts of childhood innocence, but they reminded me far too much of the cliques who tormented me when I was a bit of an outsider at that age. Maybe that is why this book left me cold? But ultimately, I think this is a new author who needs to understand that there is more to a successful novel than an intriguing style.