My Life as a Rat, (Paperback)

from bookwyrmm

Oates's writing style is truly unique, bucking many conventions while creating an engaging novel.

from miss.mesmerized

“I was twelve years old. This was the morning of the last day of my childhood.” Violet Rue has always been her father's favourite little girl. Just like her older sisters before, but not the brothers. The seventh of the children was loved beyond belief and treated differently. Jerome Kerrigan was...

from Mercef

The first book I've read by Joyce Carol Oates and I'm quite pleased to say it's not the biography of a rodent. In this case, it's the Canadian term for a young girl who is abandoned by her family after she “rats” on them. Set in Niagara, it portrays a bleak picture of rednecks, racism and domesti...

from Dabble58

Unrelentingly sad and haunting, and yet impossible to put down, this story of Vi'let and her large and troubled family is heartbreaking. It's a tale so many women know, of being left at the end of life events, having been put there not under their own agency, but at the hands of others. Mainly ma...

from maryreinert

This is really the story of the family dynamics of a strong willed Irish Catholic family whose father is the unquestioned boss, the oldest sons following in his footsteps, and the women of the family working their lives around them. Violet is the youngest of the group and at the age of twelve unw...