![]() ![]() Dare Me is just as overtly masculine and dark as those two noted novels, and the teenaged girls that populate the book might as well have testicles instead of ovaries. So it should come as no surprise that Dare Me has been compared to everything from Fight Club to Lord of the Flies. In fact, cheerleading is just as much about athletic performance as the sports squads, usually male, that they are asked to support these days. ![]() These days, as Abbott’s book points out, cheerleading squads are almost militant in asking girls to perform towering achievements, such as human pyramids, and then tend to function as boot camps. When I was in high school, and I’m pushing 40, cheerleaders were pretty much all about shaking pom-poms and rear ends, and the most daring stunt that they were probably asked to pull was to do a cartwheel. ![]() While, on the surface, Dare Me is a novel about high school cheerleading, this is not the cheerleading that you may have grown up with, if you are of a certain age. “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned,” goes a rather famous line from English playwright William Congreve, and the second part of that turn of phrase could be easily attributed to at least one of the characters from Megan Abbott’s 2012 book (now in paperback) Dare Me. ![]()
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