The Furies
I’ve been meaning to write about The Furies by Corey Croft for ages. It’s one of the projects I’m the most proud of having worked on and it’s very close to my heart. Now that we’re all stuck at home in quarantine, I have the perfect opportunity to write about it.
The Furies is everything you’d want in a book. It’s gritty. It’s pensive. It makes you think. It’s funny. It’s endearing. It’s relatable. It really strikes the perfect balance between light and dark. It thrusts you into its world, painting the perfect picture of what reality looks like for The Furies.
However, the characters are what really make The Furies what it is. Reading this book, you’ll feel like they’re friends of yours from the get-go. Seeing as I edited the story, they all became weirdly close to me, and I was deeply invested in their realities throughout. There hasn’t been a trio like Sally, Luc & Cava since Harry, Hermione & Ron if you get my drift.
The last thing I’ll say is this… I still loved this book and still wanted to re-read it after editing it. Editing a book means reading that book ad nauseam, so that rarely happens, if ever.
Keep reading for a summary of The Furies, or better yet, pick it up here and add it to your quarantine list. You won’t regret it.
~
“The city of Fury is a mother that eats its young. It’s a working class melting-pot found at the end of the line on the Quad-City Express. It’s a place where the predators are equal to the number of those preyed upon.
Living in the city is tough, and growing up there is even harder. Cava, Luc, and Sally each face their own demons trying to make it through their final year of high school. Surrounded by fiends, thieves, prostitutes, pimps, and gangs, the crew must find their own path to overcome the temptations and obstacles, and make it through just one more year.
The Furies is a dark, coming-of-age piece of YA fiction that takes place in the mid 1990s. It draws influences from hip-hop culture and contains many references of the time. It’s a nostalgic and gritty look at the urban underbelly of youth culture and the vulnerability of the working-class. It’s a harrowing tale, yet easy to relate to for anyone who has ever been a teenager and experienced love, hate, pride, and fear. It’s a must for readers of any literary fiction genre with compelling characters, realistic dialogue, and vivid city scenery. It’s both heartfelt and hard-hitting, poignant and charming.”
