The battle of the sexes goes to college in this nervy debut adult 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 Gamma Beta Chi. 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. The frat known as GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed "Gang Bang Central" and a prominent contributor to a list of 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. 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' 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.
"The Red Word is a profoundly contemporary take on one of our oldest and most corrosive stories. In note-perfect prose, Sarah Henstra sings of war at its most personal, the myth of conquest brought home to bleed on the hearth. A fierce and devastatingly timely debut."
Alissa York, author of The Naturalist
"A timely and nuanced dissection of rape culture."
Booklist
"[A]n incisive campus novel . . . 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 . . . the novel raises essential questions surrounding class privilege, rape, and gendered power dynamics on campus."
