Brutes

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.