Brutes by Dizz Tate

A small Florida town undergoing redevelopment is the backdrop of this tale. It looks like a place in flux. The lives of awkward adolescents with their quirky parents is upended when one of the girls goes missing. A mystery, but also an insight into the tension between growing up and being grown up;how our early life experiences can shape our future.

I did enjoy this book. A beautifully written story about a group of teenage friends and their experiences and feelings when a girl at their school goes missing. The narrative written as ‘we’ is interesting and the pov flashed forward to the future of each character as adults. The word ‘brutes’ to describe the group of girls is perfect.
Overall a well written debut novel.
Thanks to #NetGallery #FaberAndFaber for an arc of #Brutes in exchange for an honest review.

Firstly id like to thank Faber for approving me to read Brutes, having seen another reviewers hype it up I new I had to read it!

I wasn’t wrong either, the first 25% of the book I was having a hard time getting into but once I was past that WOW it was absolutely beautifully written, I felt like I was on a ride I couldn’t get off.

The basic plot of this book is based around a group of teenage friends and their experiences and feelings when a girl at their school goes missing. It flits back and forth to the futures of the teens, each get their own chapter on there future and what they’re doing with there lives now and how there childhood experiences affected there adult life which I also enjoyed a lot.

This book is written in second person so the main group of friends/ teens are referred to as we, and they talk collective which was a very interesting.

Iv given 4stars as like I said the beginning of the book I did struggle with but from then to end I was in ore of it.

This is my first Dizz Tate book and It won’t be my last i really enjoyed it!

2.5/5

A familiar girl called Sammy goes missing, a collection of other teens witness and endure this. This coming-of-age novel has been described as "capturing the violence, horrors and maniac joys of girlhood." Upon finishing this novel, I felt more confused in the overall direction of this tale. While I did pick up on the Jefferey Eugenides - The Virgin Suicides vibe, I still felt dulled. The characters, while combined as a 'we' collective - had individual stories, but, I really struggled to connect with them or discern their issues and events.

There is much potential in Dizz Tate, it just feels a bit tangled.

Thank you to Faber Books for giving me early access to read this novel in return for my honest review. Brutes is available from the 2nd of February 2023.

This book felt like a fever dream, in every good possible way. A challenging read for sure, with an interesting hive mind-like voice.

If a Lana Del Rey song was a novel.... but with a very big BUT!

I was immediately swept along by this book, thanks to the immersive group point of view and quite sticky prose. This group of 'girls' move and speak as one, an amorphous gelatinous gang that slips around its hot and suffocating environs watching and assessing everyone from their mothers to their neighbours to older teens. But when one of these teens goes missing the temperature really rises as the community becomes hysterical and the gang imbed themselves into the heart of the action.

Which became quite an exciting set up and I was really looking forward to going along for the ride, just as it began to go off the rails... sadly the excellent characterisation and early narrative just spiralled out of control, like the author didn't know what to make out of the fabulous putty she had in her hands.

Lots of avenues seemed to open up, including some intriguing fast-forward scenes focussing on them as individuals which ended up being red herrings, and some possible supernatural causes behind the missing teen which went nowhere, and a quick chuck in of some sexual abuse.

The ending actually made no sense at all! Unless I am missing something, it all kind of collapsed into a mish mash of almost hallucinatory ideas and no real explanation of what happened. Which is such a shame.

I feel like the publishers of this book were so enamoured by the new POV and prose at the beginning of the book they didn't pay much attention to what was happening at the end.

Brutes is a novel about teenage friendship and its strange wildness, as a group of thirteen-year-olds obsess over a missing girl. In swampy, theme-park-filled Florida, a group of friends—all girls, with Christian an honorary girl—are obsessed with Sammy, a preacher's daughter. They watch her, but then she suddenly goes missing, and the group watch the town instead, with a sinister sense of hunger underneath.

Most of the chapters are told from a first person plural perspective, with the group of thirteen year olds the 'we' telling the story, and this really sets up the conceit of the book, the weird friendship group, the 'brutes' as their mothers call them, watching and wishing. The narration is very effective, showing the strange bonds and the ways in which this breaks down, as well as a dark story of trying to get more than a run-down Florida life. Some of the chapters are told from the perspective of one of the group as adults, and this works less well because they're very fragmented and don't quite come together with the rest, although some of these chapters work better than others.

An ambiguous book that dives into a vivid Florida and a specific group mindset, Brutes is likely to divide between people who like the style and ambiguity, and people who wanted more definitive answers about what is going on.

no idea what just happened or what it means but….I liked it? Kind of like if Brown Girls, The Virgin Suicides, Bunny and Tell Me Who We Were had a weird little Floridian baby. I really loved the collective ‘we’ voice this book was told in and following this group of unlikeable, unsettling, strange girls as they navigate friendship, love, curiosity, obsession, loss of innocence and the world together. This book definitely won’t be for everyone, especially if you don’t like ambiguous, kind of confusing plots/endings, but I really enjoyed this and can’t wait to recommend it to people when it’s out!

'Brutes' is a interesting and unsettling debut novel. I don't understand everything that happened, but I appreciated the writing style, particularly the "we" POV.

I received an advanced readers copy through net galley in exchange for a honest review.

Despite the strong and intriguing start of Brutes, the novel quickly becomes tiresome due to the narration choice, which was chosen to sound as mysterious and "foggy" as possible, yet the way things were described made it utterly fail to capture that and instead turn rather tedious to read.


Further more the plot seems to switch between nothing happening, to fast forwards with no logical direction.


The characters also seemed very interesting and it was quite a shame the book had such a confusing plot to the point I couldn't tell what was going on most of the time

This novel definitely did read like The Virgin Suicides. It was haunting and obsessive. I think this novel shows the authors talents as it’s a debut and believe that the authors future works will be even better!

I really enjoyed the “we” POV, the merging of the characters into one but didn’t particular enjoy each characters own chapter. I thought the novel would have read better using just the “we” POV as it was quite hypnotic.

Overall, a good debut with some interesting stylistic choices, the atmosphere of the setting was really well done but there were parts of the novel that lost me.

At first I was intrigued by this book and enjoyed the writing style. It reminded me a lot of Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

It was an interesting tale of events but it’s fair to say I did get a little lost. There was a lot of time jumps and point of views that weren’t very clear so it had me guessing.

The word ‘Brutes’ is perfect to describe the group of girls in this book. They are truly awful and unlikeable but I think that’s what the author wanted to portray.

I spent a lot of time confused. I was hoping at the end it would become clear what was going on but unfortunately I’m still unsure as to the actual plot and what the author wanted me to take away from reading this book.

The whole Sammy situation in this book has left me with questions, it’s a strange one.

Brutes is the debut novel by Dizz Tate, detailing the disappearance of a pastor's daughter and a clique of Floridian teenage girls and their view of the world. The claustrophobic narrative is ambitious for a first novel, with different characters appearing at intervals to add to the overall structure of the story. The girls themselves are not very nice - hence the book's title - but there is fun to be had in seeing the whole thing unfold. Beneath the dreamlike prose there exists a dark undercurrent of foreboding and a rather sinister plot. The steamy, alligator-infested lakes lie in stark contrast to the family-friendly facade of Walt Disney World, and the novel nicely evokes a sense of unsettling disquiet. This is a coming of age novel, but it's nothing overtly original, coming so soon after Emma Cline's The Girls, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and Suzanne Berne's A Crime in the Neighbourhood, which trod similar paths.
Having said that, it's certainly well written, although one does feel that Tate will go on to better things. The chapters jump forward and back in time, and this isn't always obvious, so it's a challenging read at times. It's not a book that I could recommend however.

Brutes is very much a novel of impressions: it is deliberately (and often frustratingly) obtuse. Tate churns a disturbing, oppressive atmosphere that her young teen protagonists simultaneously revel in and rebel against. The problem is, you get the message after only a few pages, and after that there's not much more to be gained. The plot is as listless as the characters, the theme of innocence soured is laid on thick. A nice concept for a short story, perhaps, but far too laboured for a novel.

Like other reviewers have said, this is a confusing book and the plot is all over the place. I kept waiting for something to happen that didn't. The characters are not likeable and most of them are mean and manipulative, to a greater or lesser extent, The book verges on disturbing, but the overriding theme for me was the utter hopelessness of everyone's situation. I don't know what the author was hoping readers would take away from reading the book.

An immersive, hypnotic read. The brutes of the title - a group of tweenage girls - loiter omnipresently around the borders of their lakeside community, seeing everything and saying very little. When a pastor's daughter, the object of their obsession, goes missing, it's apparent that they know more than they're letting on.

The strength of this novel is the collective voice of the narrative, the girls forming one entity expressed in the repeated 'we'. This is done excellently and really adds to the atmosphere of the setting. By contrast, I didn't find the time-skip chapters which removed the characters from their collective existence nearly as compelling; however I think they probably were needed to anchor the story further in reality, as the 'we' narrative could have been exhausting if it was sustained for the entire book.

I felt that the story lost its way a little towards the end and became hard to follow (or maybe I just got lost myself) - otherwise, I would have given this five stars.

I’m a bit confused. I loved the writing style and it was very compelling & poetic as others have said. It’s dark and descriptive but it also felt very confusing and cryptic. I struggled to keep track of who was who and what was really going on. That said it was a very unique way of looking at life of a group of young teens. Just don’t think this was one for me.

Other reviewers have described this book as ‘lyrical’, ‘poetic’, ‘hypnotic’, but I spent about 90% of the time reading it in a state of perpetual confusion. I quite like a story that hints at what’s to come, or has puzzling events not explained till later, but in this book there was too much puzzling and nowhere near enough explaining.
‘Enigmatic’ and ‘cryptic’, I would say, and the writer has a very poetic descriptive style, but the actual path of the story got lost, for me.
Thank you NetGalley for an ARC..

A highly original novel thought provoking and in places quite horrific
I loved the way the group of feral young people are written as an amorphous ill defined group .The story is described through their ever watchful eyes ,we initially don’t know how many are in the group and we only learn this gradually as their names appear in the story .They are finally named as the Brutes of the title .I don’t think I’ve ever read a book written in this way and I really enjoyed the concept
The author evokes the sweltering heat of a Florida spring so perfectly ,I loved the comparison of the grubby down at heel neighbourhood that the Brutes live in with their single parent mothers with the smarter estate where the missing girl lives
The innocence of young children is portrayed so well in the early stages of the book their all seeing eyes and their opinions of their parents ,of each other other older children is perfect .Sadly the innocence doesn’t last and the way that this slowly unwinds during the telling of the story adds a tense foreboding mirrored by the gathering thunderstorms over alligator infested Florida Lakes .It made me feel quite nauseous with tension
The novel touches on child sexual abuse but does this in a subtle nuanced way that somehow makes the episode even more shocking
The author has a beautifully poetic way of using language to tell the story and I felt the book was a unique unusual one ,I very much enjoyed reading it
I read an early copy in NetGalley Uk the book is published in the Uk 2 February 2023 by Fabre

Brutes

So I’ve just finished Brutes.(not that anyone would of known that 😆)

Anyways…So I have very conflicting feelings about this book, there was plenty I did enjoy about this book, there was plenty I didn’t/didn’t get (that’s probably a me issue)
The first half of the book I was so invested i was hooked i got through the first 50% in around 2hours/2hr 30 mins.

The latter stage just really fell flat and started to lose its steam 😭😭 if it did continue on the trajectory it did, this could of possibly been a 5 star but sadly it just unraveled and hit a bump on the road and couldn’t get back on track.