The small town of Prescott, Oregon, has a dark history of assault that it likes to keep hidden. But in The Nowhere Girls, three young women have had enough of the predators roaming the halls of their high school.
Grace Salter, Rosina Suarez and Erin DeLillo sit at what everybody in the Prescott High lunchroom knows is the weirdo table. Grace is the new girl who just moved to town because her preacher mom is too liberal and radical. Rosina is the queer, punk girl in a conservative, Mexican-American family. And Erin, though a genius, deals with the social struggles of her extreme Asperger’s every single day.
Together, they anonymously organize the Nowhere Girls in order to push back against the overt sexism, victim blaming, slut shaming and outright rape culture running rampant at Prescott. Their first move: withholding sex of any kind from the boys at their school. And as the Nowhere Girls continue to meet and grow in numbers, they begin to find strength in their own voices, take control of their own bodies and discover that they are far stronger and more capable than they’d ever been allowed to imagine.
Borrowing from the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, author Amy Reed crafts a powerful, moving and nuanced set of characters who experience the same abuse that far too many girls suffer. Reed’s The Nowhere Girls shows readers the power each woman possesses—and she lets her characters serve as examples of how young people can take care of each other while simultaneously demanding and effecting real change in their communities.
Justin Barisich is a freelancer, satirist, poet and performer living in Atlanta. More of his writing can be found at littlewritingman.com.
This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
