Dead Girls by Abigail Tarttelin
“Men are everywhere. If I ran away from here, there would be more men all over the world, men who punch and rape and kill girls like me…I look in my own reflection in the mirror. There is nowhere to hide.”
Forget what you have read about dead girls. Abigail Tarttelin is adding a feminist twist to a genre that's deeply rooted in misogyny with her new novel, Dead Girls. While the subject of murdered young girls has remained popular among true crime podcasts, TV series, and literature, so much so that writer Alice Bolin defines dead girls as a genre, you might be deterred from picking up another book on a wildly saturated concept. But while most dead girl stories focus on the men solving the crime or the tragedy of the young girl’s life, Tarttelin takes a different approach—on that has made this book haunt me for days after reading.
It’s 1999 in Eastcastle, England, a peaceful rural community. When eleven-year-old Billie is found murdered, her best friend, Thera Wilde, takes it upon herself to find the killer. Observant, fearless and curious, Thera arms herself with books on ouija boards, automatic writing and other works on ghostly visitations after she is visited by the ghosts of Billie and four other dead girls. By connecting the clues she is given and her determination to put these girls to rest, Thera is dead set on finding the murderer, unhesitant to give her own life to the cause.
The word “pervert” is thrown around town once evidence has been found that Billie was sexually assaulted before being killed, a word Thera has never heard before. The dead girls start telling Thera their stories, tales of their own sexual abuse before their death. For a girl as young as Thera, these stories are confusing. She grapples with what makes men want to do these things to young girls. Are all men bad? Do all men have this desire within them? Will her friend Nathan grow into a man that wants to hurt girls? Thera’s curiosity is boundless as she questions the adults around her, observes her own body for clues or reasons why the killer may have chosen Billie.
Tarttelin takes on difficult but timely themes such as the responsibilities of women, how women are taught to protect themselves and how we talk to young girls about men. While it is uncomfortable to see a happy, playful child like Thera quickly learn about pedophilia, rape, and violence, her determination to confront the ugly and shine the light on the darkness makes this a story of female resilience and bravery.
Dead Girls actually feels like a story about girls. As I mentioned, the death of young girls is often a catalysis for us to tell stories about men—the ones who hurt the girls, the ones who solved their murders. But Tarttelin stays away from this and creates a hero out of one of the young girls that could have been murdered herself. Not only is this a refreshing take, but it is a needed one. In the back of the book, Tarrtelin gives a statistic from UNICEF, that “every ten minutes an adolescent girl dies a violent death.” The girls haunting Thera also haunted me. Because their story is the story of so many young girls today.
Riveting, suspenseful and wildly smart, Dead Girls is a portrait of how grief can shape a person, what it means to be a girl, friendship, childhood, gender and revenge.
Dead Girls
By Abigail Tarttelin
377 pages. 2019
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