Joyce Carol Oates
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Review of Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates
I often wish JCO would write more science fiction. This felt a bit like A Handmaid’s Tale. The initial sections describing the system of rewards and punishment, how society has morphed into this recognizable, twisted near-future I found less compelling than the love story at the heart of the novel.…
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Review of Breathe by Joyce Carol Oates
A heart-rending meditation on grief. Our protagonist’s battle with losing her partner encapsulates all the stages, every sidereal and ethereal sentiment imaginable.Shaped within the austere landscapes of New Mexico, through achronological snippets of her university life, in and out of the hospital as Gerard succumbs to a generic illness, our…
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Review of Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates
My experience with JCO books is that sometimes she gets into this mode of extreme, frenetic pessimism. Near-continual verbal abuse. Characters spouting off like they have a compulsive speech disorder. Extreme levels of repetition. She continues circling the topics she often reverts to, without moving the plot forward. That is…
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Review of Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates
A more succinct example of Dark Academia than The Secret History, and in my opinion, better. Better yet, it can be read in one sitting. The only criteria I require a book to fulfill to earn a five-star rating from me is that I can’t stop reading. And this book…
L. S. Popovich 