Girls Play Dead

One of the New York Times‘ Fall Preview Picks • One of the Washington Post‘s Fall Preview Picks • One of Kirkus Reviews‘ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • One of Lit Hub’s Favorite Books of 2025 • One of Harper’s Bazaar‘s Best Books of Fall 2025 • One of The Millions‘ Great Fall Books

“Riveting and provocative…Percy’s lyrical prose and skilled storytelling make even the most harrowing sequences read like a novel…part of what makes Girls Play Dead so good…is that Percy is not telling readers what to think. She is simply allowing them to feel, by telling the stories—including the messy ones, the ones that are difficult to read and the morally complex ones—that have so often been absent.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Girls Play Dead reads like a novel, exquisitely rendered, and a kind of geography, mapping out the complexities of women’s experiences going ‘down below’ and the specific ways that they come to understand their altered bodies and minds. Percy is a beautiful writer who somehow finds the narratives that exist in the spaces of the ones we already know.” —Rachel Aviv, New York Times bestselling author of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

“Girls Play Dead is a captivating, myth-busting look at sexual assault….Percy’s writing is consistently lovely, even when her subject is almost unbearably dark. Readers are swept along on the tide of her imagery.” —The Washington Post

“Percy’s subject is brutal, but her writing allays some of the impact by being almost impossibly beautiful: crisp, vulnerable, lyrical….She has a miniaturist’s eye for detail and a raw compassion in her analysis….Her stories, woven together, become something like a fabric, a totality….Girls Play Dead is a vital continuation of [the effort] ‘to tell true stories of women’s lives,’ in such breadth and definition that the justice system finally has to acknowledge what it’s been obscuring.” —Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic

“A brave and clear-eyed look at the ways sexual assault affects women, Jen Percy brings her gimlet eye and scalpel prose to a topic as ugly as it is ubiquitous. This is a work of cultural criticism and self-examination that really does (cliche be damned!) read like a novel. What makes the book beautiful is its stalwart commitment to honesty and compassion.” —The Boston Globe

“Heartbreaking [but] filled with liberating accounts of the varied responses to violence….Percy’s ability to condense and explain traumatic reactions in conversation shows how much of the subject remains woefully underexplored.” —Interview Magazine

“Percy brings her unflinchingly compassionate gaze to trauma suffered by victims of sexual assault….[She] generously threads in her own memories throughout, from her singular upbringing surviving the Oregon wilderness to her own passivity in early sexual experiences with men….Groundbreaking and nuanced.” —Vulture

“Jen Percy has captured, in the most lyrical and authentic way possible, what it means to be a woman alive today. The threats, the systems, the brutality and the beauty. Girls Play Dead illustrates what our best books can do, what they can say in a time of crisis, and indeed, why we need them for our very survival. I read it, got to the end and immediately began again. It is so full of wisdom and heart and somehow—I don’t know how she’s done it—makes me feel less alone in the world. I am fully in awe of this book.” —Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises and Women We Buried, Women We Burned

“Girls Play Dead is the book I have been waiting for—a book about freezing, frozen women, hysterical women, trembling women, and how these reactions to trauma, insensible as they may outwardly seem, are our purest acts of survival. Jen Percy is a magician.” —Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Man Who Could Move Clouds

“Girls Play Dead is a masterful, prose-driven, consistently surprising literary examination of fear itself. This book will change the way you think about other minds.”
—Kerry Howley, author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

“A rigorous and groundbreaking inquiry, Jen Percy’s Girls Play Dead reminds us that there is so much more to understand about women’s inner lives and the impact of sexual violence. Percy’s entirely fresh perspective is liberating and expansive, as are her luminous descriptions of her unique childhood. The story of a young woman’s formative experiences has never been told quite like this.” —Suzy Hansen, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Notes on a Foreign Country

“With Girls Play Dead, Jen Percy captures an entire dimension of women’s experience that until now has remained unnameable. Through several compelling voices, including her own, she tells of the often-surprising ways in which our bodies absorb shames and traumas great and small, and how far our minds can stretch to spin stories that help us survive. So many women have been waiting for a way to have this conversation—and here it is.” —Alex Mar, author of Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy

“[Girls Play Dead] unflinchingly tackles the issue of gender-based sexual violence . . . Drawing from both her own personal history and investigative reporting, Percy is determined to disrupt the ways we are conditioned to think about sexual abuse, intergenerational trauma, and survival.” —Harper’s Bazaar

“[Jen Percy shows] an immense capacity for empathy and nuance. . . .Percy has done an excellent job of discussing an essential topic with understanding and sensitivity. The openness and willingness to consider the most difficult aspects of an already difficult subject are remarkable, as are the research and the understanding needed to tell these critical stories.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A groundbreaking exploration of women’s often shamed and silenced responses to sexual assault. . . .Extensive, empathetic. . . .A vital record of a little discussed aspect of women’s lived reality.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Percy’s inquiry embraces contradiction . . . .Accessible reading on a difficult and necessary topic.” —Booklist

“Percy demonstrates the failures of storytelling to bring about timely justice, even as she engages in the retelling….Girls Play Dead doesn’t ask why abuse happens, but how we survive violation, how we respond to fear, and how we tell our stories.” —The Brooklyn Rail