Review/Tour Post: Nowhere Girls

Three misfits come together to avenge the rape of a fellow classmate and in the process trigger a change in the misogynist culture at their high school transforming the lives of everyone around them in this searing and timely story.

Who are the Nowhere Girls?

They’re every girl. But they start with just three:

Grace Salter is the new girl in town, whose family was run out of their former community after her southern Baptist preacher mom turned into a radical liberal after falling off a horse and bumping her head.

Rosina Suarez is the queer punk girl in a conservative Mexican immigrant family, who dreams of a life playing music instead of babysitting her gaggle of cousins and waitressing at her uncle’s restaurant.

Erin Delillo is obsessed with two things: marine biology and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but they aren’t enough to distract her from her suspicion that she may in fact be an android.

When Grace learns that Lucy Moynihan, the former occupant of her new home, was run out of town for having accused the popular guys at school of gang rape, she’s incensed that Lucy never had justice. For their own personal reasons, Rosina and Erin feel equally deeply about Lucy’s tragedy, so they form an anonymous group of girls at Prescott High to resist the sexist culture at their school, which includes boycotting sex of any kind with the male students.

Told in alternating perspectives, this groundbreaking novel is an indictment of rape culture and explores with bold honesty the deepest questions about teen girls and sexuality.

Amy Reed was born and raised in and around Seattle, where she attended a total of eight schools by the time she was eighteen. Constant moving taught her to be restless and being an only child made her imagination do funny things. After a brief stint at Reed College (no relation), she moved to San Francisco and spent the next several years serving coffee and getting into trouble. She eventually graduated from film school, promptly decided she wanted nothing to do with filmmaking, returned to her original and impractical love of writing, and earned her MFA from New College of California. Her short work has been published in journals such as Kitchen Sink, Contrary, and Fiction. Amy currently lives in Oakland with her husband and two cats, and has accepted that Northern California has replaced the Pacific Northwest as her home. She is no longer restless. Find out more at amyreedfiction.com.

BEAUTIFUL is her first novel.

This book was a mixed experience for me. I’ll be honest, I struggle reading books that has this kind of… graphic content. So, if you have younger readers or are sensitive to violence/graphic/triggering content, I would NOT suggest this book. That isn’t because of it being bad, far from it, it is just a book covering very sensitive topics.

The writing for this novel was exceptionally compelling. Reed did a wonderful job of writing about touchy subjects, in a way that got the mind working. Not only did she make a subtle argument, she also managed to write a story in which every viewpoint and side was covered. In many cases of literature, and other media, you can see one side painted as the bad guy and vice versa. Reed was really incredible in the way she painted humans. Through her work she wasn’t saying men were terrible, or women superior. She gave the raw and real viewpoint of people, and allowed the reader to do what they would with that info.

As I said, this book did have some disturbing content. After all, it is dealing with disturbing, but real, content. Reed uses these scenes to support her storyline, and everything that happened happened with a cause. I don’t know if that makes sense… To be honest, this was one of those books that was hard to understand or explain without reading it.. From the way it was written, to the topics it touched, The Nowhere Girls was a very unique novel, that has the power to change many people’s perspectives.

Reed wrote in a way that connected to the human essence – the wrote real people struggling and processing the real evils of the world. She wrote a very real story, that, if you approach it with an open mind, has the potential to change your entire perspective.

Maddie