Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation
Captivating but occasionally convoluted ... The violent stories in the first half of Girls Play Dead make for grim but critical reading ... Percy’s writing is consistently lovely, even when her subject is almost unbearably dark ... But the power and poise of the prose are liabilities as well as assets: Percy is so mesmeric a stylist that the elegance of her elliptical writing can obscure its conceptual clumsiness ... The latter half of Girls Play Dead is no longer about girls playing dead in the wake of sexual violence. Instead, it billows into a more amorphous exploration.
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Riveting and provocative ... It’s a dark subject, but Percy’s lyrical prose and skilled storytelling make even the most harrowing sequences read like a novel ... Poignant ... These are stories that many women will recognize ... Part of what makes Girls Play Dead so good — and so different from much other journalism on this subject — is that Percy is not telling readers what to think.
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Riveting, heartrending ... Percy’s subject is brutal, but her writing allays some of the impact by being almost impossibly beautiful: crisp, vulnerable, lyrical ... Girls Play Dead illuminates how stories can trap people, how the impulse to rewrite a violation or rescue an abuser leads us away from the truth. But Percy also seems to feel that showing us the texture and shared features of human experience might be the crucial thing that can make a difference.
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