The Red Word
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
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 polarized 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.
Named One of the Best New Books of the Month by Harper's Bazaar, PopSugar, Bitch, Fast Company, and Read It Forward
"The smartest, most provocative novel I've read in a long time. 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, New York Times-bestselling author
"Will get you fuming, laughing, cheering, and most of all, thinking."—Cosmopolitan
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Sarah Henstra. (2018). The Red Word. Grove Atlantic.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Sarah Henstra. 2018. The Red Word. Grove Atlantic.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Sarah Henstra, The Red Word. Grove Atlantic, 2018.
MLA Citation (style guide)Sarah Henstra. The Red Word. Grove Atlantic, 2018.
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 1 | 1 |
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- bioText: Sarah Henstra is a professor of English at Ryerson University. She is the author of the young adult novel Mad Miss Mimic, which was published by Penguin Canada. The Red Word is her first work of adult fiction. She lives in Toronto.Emily Woo Zeller is an Audie and Earphones Award-winning narrator, voice-over artist, actor, dancer, and choreographer. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013. Her voice-over career includes work in animated film and television in Southeast Asia.
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- "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."—PopSugar
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 polarized 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.
Named One of the Best New Books of the Month by Harper's Bazaar, PopSugar, Bitch, Fast Company, and Read It Forward
"The smartest, most provocative novel I've read in a long time. 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, New York Times-bestselling author
"Will get you fuming, laughing, cheering, and most of all, thinking."—Cosmopolitan - reviews
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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.
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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.
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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 polarized camps, ringleader housemate... - sortTitle
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