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.