She turns despair and triumph and rage into words, into something so visceral, something we can understand-and relate to. This story has an angry, deeply wounded heart that screams for your attention. Women on their journey to understand the magnitude of their own hearts, fierce and terrifyingly brave. Women who were still healing from things they don’t talk about, gathering up the silence like a mantle and carrying it along with them, step by step, until they’ve had enough. Women standing shoulder to shoulder, each seeing hope, a mirror of their own, brightened like newly burnished stones that had been muted under dust. The Nowhere Girls is about the quiet competence and determination of young women doing remarkable things without knowing first that they can do them. Women taking a stand, linking arms with other women, advocating on behalf of one another to effect change, their ferocity softening not a whit. So instead of admitting the world is ugly, they shit on the messenger for telling them about it.”

People hate having to change the way they see things. “The things is,” Rosina says, “people don’t want to hear something that’ll make their lives more difficult, even if it’s the truth. How long would the town cling to their denial, trying to cover these boys’ crimes as if with some threadbare blanket? How long until enough is enough? A system that instead built a monument to their abusers’ crimes. Together with Rosina and Erin, Grace creates an anonymous group, “ the Nowhere Girls”, as a call to arms for all the girls who were forced to remain still, stifled, and quiet, their pain always passing unremarked, by a system who didn’t care. She refuses to falter into painful silence and let the truth of what had happened to Lucy die like a song with no one left to sing it. Now that Grace had named Lucy’s anguish, it hung from everything, clinging like spiderwebs, unavoidable. Grace’s classmates, Rosina Suarez, a Mexican-American queer punk rocker, and Erin DeLillo, a girl with Asperger’s, explain that the former occupant was Lucy, a girl who was driven out of town after she accused a group of popular jocks in her school of gang rape.

Grace has moved to Prescott, Oregon, and finds words of searing agony and sorrow carved into the wall of her new room and carving their hurricane path through her mind, pushing everything out of its way.

The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed