82. Book Inspired: Think of your favorite book. Now write a poem that sums up the entire story in 10 lines.
The Quarry Girls by Jess Lourey
I can not do this in a poem. I doubt I’ll even do that good of a job with just a regular book synopsis.
A girl’s disappearance shepherds in bad things in a small Minnesota town. There is an assumption that the girl just ran away but we know she’s been kidnapped and repeatedly sexually abused. The story shifts back and forth between this girl’s experience locked in a basement and 3 high school best friends. The protagonist Heather lives in a dysfunctional family that tries to keep up good appearances but day after day, Heather learns that she can’t trust authority figures including her District Attorney father. One of Heather’s friends disappears, is assumed to have run away, but when she’s found dead in the quarry, is judged to have been suicidal. This is then repeated by Heather’s second friend but the death is deemed an accident. Heather knows neither suicide nor accident is what killed her best friends but has a hard time finding out the truth. Patriarchy and misogyny allows the men to behave as they think they should be allowed which means they are all complicit in these deaths and pieces of shit. I was very depressed while reading this because it felt all too real.
