The Red Word

January 1, 2018

A Canadian woman named Karen Huls looks back on her turbulent sophomore year at a U.S. university in the 1990s, when she moved into a communal house with several politically provocative feminist and/or lesbian students who were influenced by a charismatic women's studies professor. At the same time, Karen is dating a frat boy while lusting after another in the same fraternity--a suspected sexual predator. Karen tries to keep a foot in both the feminist and the traditional male worlds, and it doesn't go well. Given the age of the characters--college students and beyond--this book takes place in new adult territory, but it reads like a YA novel with explicit sex (Henstra wrote the YA novel Mad Miss Mimic, but this is her first adult novel). The story's tension stems from the protagonist's flirtation with both radical and conservative forces and readers will wonder how these forces will collide. Chapters are named for rhetorical figures of speech, which are fun to research if you're not familiar with them, and the plot molds itself on a Greek drama. VERDICT The tone of this page-turning but inconsistent novel is often light, which is at odds with its serious theme of rape on campus.--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2018
Young adult author Henstra’s first adult outing is an incisive campus novel. Set in the mid-’90s, the story follows a group of four sorority-bashing, fraternity-loathing ultrafeminists at an unnamed Ivy League university, most of them lesbians who live in an off-campus house they nickname Raghurst. Karen, a Canadian, becomes the girls’ fifth housemate and distinguishes herself from the pack by dating Mike, a member of one of the most notorious fraternities, Gamma Beta Chi. When word gets around that the good-looking Bruce Comfort, another Gamma Beta Chi, got a girl on campus pregnant and refuses to take responsibility, Raghurst ringleader Dyann concocts a plan to roofie the fraternity at their own party. But a female partygoer gets caught in the crossfire and gang-raped after accidentally consuming the drug. The result is a campuswide debate about what exactly happened that night and who is responsible. Henstra portrays Greek life in a harsh light and doesn’t hold back when describing the excessive drunkenness, debauchery, and deplorable misogynistic attitudes at Gamma Beta Chi. Though the parts of the story that take place 15 years in the future seem underdeveloped and a few aspects of the Raghurst–vs.–Gamma Beta Chi saga don’t fully ring true, the novel raises essential questions surrounding class privilege, rape, and gendered power dynamics on campus. Agent: Monica Pacheco, the McDermid Agency.

November 15, 2017
Set in the 1990s, The Red Word interrogates the prevailing political preoccupations of that time: gender politics, third-wave feminism, and consent. Henstra (Mad Miss Mimic, 2017) sets her first novel for adults at an East Coast college. Told from the perspective of a Canadian named Karen looking back on her time as a horny undergraduate, the book follows a group of incredibly earnest young women as enamored with feminist theory as they are with their own cleverness. Karen and her friends live in a shared house they call Raghurst, where they spend their time gossiping, dissecting the male gaze, and dabbling in Wicca. Raghurst abuts a frat house nicknamed Gang Bang Central, where Karen finds a reasonably witty boyfriend named Mike and where, rumor has it, the fraternity engages in some very unsavory extracurriculars. As it happens, Gang Bang Central lives up to its name. When the bros victimize a Raghurst associate, Karen must literally and figuratively confront her role in patriarchal oppression. A timely and nuanced dissection of rape culture ensues.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2018
An aesthetically arresting interrogation of rape culture on campus.Like many an epic tale, this is the story of a war between two great houses. On one side there is the fraternity Gamma Beta Chi, also known as "Gang Bang Central." On the other, Raghurst, the home of a collective of radical feminists. Sophomore Karen Huls lands between these two extremes when she wakes up in the backyard Gamma Beta Chi shares with Raghurst and remembers, "I had sex with somebody." The "red word" of the title is rape, "a double-sided axe brandished in a circle over the head." This novel is, among other things, an interrogation of what that word means and whom it hurts. Karen moves into Raghurst, dazzled by the heady discourse of her new housemates and the charismatic professor who serves as their mentor. But she is also an insider at GBC--she's dating one brother and intensely, irrationally attracted to another. As a plan to expose the frat as an epicenter of violent misogyny spirals out of control, Karen is caught in the middle. And she is the first to ask the question that becomes the central theme of this book: "Are the right people suffering?" (e.g., being punished). This is also a question that hangs over Classical tragedy. The women of Raghurst are keenly interested in the ways in which myth shapes reality, and Henstra's text is shot through with antique allusions. The narrative begins with an invocation of the muse. There are references to Artemis and Maenads and Medusa, female figures who pose a threat to men by transgressing the rules that govern women. Helen of Troy becomes a sort of mirror for Karen as she explores the limits and possibilities of female agency in a patriarchal world. And, at moments of high drama, Henstra's language echoes Homer. Dyann Brooks-Morriss, Raghurst's leader, is "battlethirsty" and "redglistening." Bruce Comfort, the frat brother who fuels Karen's fantasies, is given epithets like "heavengoing" and "goldbright."Timely and brilliant.

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