Saturday, December 11, 2021

Eleven unexpected thrillers about female rage

Rachel Kapelke-Dale is the co-author of Graduates in Wonderland (2014), a memoir about the significance and nuances of female friendships, and a newly released novel, The Ballerinas.

She writes:
When I started writing The Ballerinas, I wanted to write an updated version of Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, an ode to female friendships. But the more I returned to my own ballet days, and the more I thought about the structures—both social and artistic—that surrounded my characters, the more I realized that they were actually furious. And as I let them follow this fury to its logical endpoint, the novel turned into something very different from what I had planned.
At CrimeReads Kapelke-Dale tagged eleven thrillers "featuring some very angry women," including:
Dare Me by Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott takes the trope of the ditzy cheerleader and turns it on its head in this novel about two intense teenagers and their clashes with their new coach. As the narrator, Addy, becomes entranced by their new coach, her friend Beth becomes increasingly angry. Over the course of the novel, the girls’ anger—at each other, but also, in a larger sense, at the roles they are forced to play—drives them to unexpected extremes.
Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

Dare Me is among Debbie Babitt's eight top coming-of-age thrillers, Avery Bishop's top five novels that explore "mean girl" culture, Kelly Simmons's six books to buddy-read with your teen or twentyish daughter, Katie Lowe's top eight crime novels for angry women in an angry world, Kate Hamer's top ten teenage friendships in fiction, S.R. Masters's seven thrillers that capture some of the darker aspects of tight-knit friendship groups, Jessica Knoll's top ten thrillers, Brian Boone's fifty most essential high school stories, Julie Buntin's twelve books that totally get female friendship, L.S. Hilton's top ten female-fronted thrillers, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Anna Fitzpatrick's four top horror stories set in the real universe of girlhood and Adam Sternbergh's six notable crime novels that double as great literature.

--Marshal Zeringue