Brutes

By: Dizz Tate

Narrated by: Eleanor McCormick

The Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project in this wildly original debut-a coming-of-age story about the crucible of girlhood, from a writer of rare and startling talent.

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

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.

Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the 'we' of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.

©2023 Dizz Tate (P)2023 Faber Audio

Raw dreamy portrayal of girlhood

I absolutely loved it, took me a few chapters but the narration and 1st person storytelling from the young girls as singular unit is incredibly endearing and refreshing.

Missing most of chapter 6

I was following allowing with a hardcopy and it skipped most of the 6th chapter, which was like 10 pages.

I originally HATED this but it quickly grew on me!

edit 01/2024: something has happened to this audiobook since i purchased it a while back, and most of chapter 6 is now missing. audible was great with trying to help me resolve this, but the issue could not be fixed, so i received a return credit back. hopefully this issue gets fixed soon because it's the best version (as noted in my original review below).

OK, so when i first listened to this through my local library, I was SO ANNOYED by the narrator's voice, the lack of plot, not understanding what was going on AT ALL, and the entire time I was just like HUH???? and cranking up the speed of the audiobook to 1.8x speed just to get through it.


BUT.....then i went on goodreads, read some reviews that gave MUCH NEEDED context, and then I couldn't get the story out of my head and i re-listened to it, and for some reason the narrator no longer annoyed me and it became my go-to book for falling asleep to.

One warning I will give: there are TWO versions of this SAME book here on audible. THIS version has chapter breakdowns with the characters names in them so you know who is talking (this made the original listen to this audiobook so confusing because I never knew who was talking) and this version is also cleaned up a bit and the narrator's voice is more clearer/pronounced.

I HIGHLY recommend only purchasing THIS version or I think you will run into the same problems that lead me to initially hating this book. But now I love it so much that I've bought a hard copy of the book.

If I could sum up this book without giving away any spoilers, I'd say it's about toxic friendships and is a 90% "vibes only" book but there is an actual plot in here, I promise.