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 wings of furies.
'Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word will get you fuming, laughing, cheering, and most of all, thinking.' — Cosmopolitan
'The Red Word is the smartest, most provocative novel I’ve read in a long time.
PGW Winter 2018 Omnibus
Sarah Henstra dives headlong into some murky, turbulent waters—gender politics,
campus sexual assault, complicity, moral responsibility — and emerges with a book
that’s as shocking as it is essential.' — Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers
'Timely and incisive, young adult author Sarah Henstra makes her adult fiction debut
with this tale of collegiate politics and campus rape. Infused with Homerian weight,
the novel is appropriately Greek-focused, centering on a controversy between bad boy
fraternity house Gamma Beta Chi, the radical feminists of Raghurst, and a young
woman caught between the two when a set-up to call out the fraternity's rape culture
leads to unintended tragedy.' — Harper’s Bazaar, '14 Books You Should Read This
March'
'A timely, telling look at rape culture on campus, Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word
boldly goes to the places where memoir can’t but fiction can — and gives way to one
hell of a realistic narrative.' — Popsugar
'Set in the 1990s, The Red Word interrogates the prevailing political preoccupations
of that time: gender politics, third-wave feminism, and consent...A timely and
nuanced dissection of rape culture.' — Booklist
'An aesthetically arresting interrogation of rape culture…timely and brilliant.' — Kirkus
Reviews
