Filthy Creation - Caroline Hagood - Bog

In Filthy Creation, Dylan makes sense of her world through art. Her house is a graveyard of inspiring auto parts her mechanic father has dragged home, her family's ongoing Frankenstein diorama, and Dylan's own mishmash of assemblage projects that she sets on fire whenever they don't meet her standards. Dylan and Shay fall in artsy, gothy, queer love even as Dylan is figuring out that her dead dad-whose ghost has been visiting her even though she doesn't believe in such things-was not in fact her biological father, but who was? As Dylan tries to find out, and find herself as an artist, she gets sucked into the world of visiting art teacher, Simon Ambrogio-learning to box and to embrace the more violent side of creativity, and running away from her secret-keeping mother. But she has raw and passionate artwork, and shouldn't that be enough? Filthy Creation asks what it means to be a girl maker. How do girls fit into the false dichotomy between brilliant, monstrous men artists and supposedly domesticated women ones? And how can a young artist even figure out her own identity amid all this noise?