The Red Word

Description:


The battle of the sexes goes to college in this nervy debut novel by a powerful
new voice.

A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which
ideology can go, The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore
year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry — particularly at a fraternity
called GBC. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of
radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus.
GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed 'Gang Bang Central' and a prominent
contributor to a list of date rapists compiled by female students. 

Despite continuing to
party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the
intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise
her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a
charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore. As Karen finds herself caught
between two increasingly polarised camps, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she
has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of
rape culture — but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.

The Red Word captures beautifully the feverish binarism of campus politics and the
headlong rush of youth toward new friends, lovers, and life-altering ideas.

With
strains of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, Alison Lurie's Truth and
Consequences, and Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, Sarah Henstra's debut adult
novel arrives on the win