This was my first novel by Joyce Carol Oates and boy was it intense (in a good way),

Not only was the novel length (600+ pages) but Oates writes in such a way that you need to read it slowly to take in every ounce of detail. Even thought this took me a while to get through, it was worth every second.

In many ways, this reads to me like JCO's riposte to Nabokov's [book:Lolita|7604], a book name-checked in the text but which Mr Fox rejects. The implication is that he can't bear the mirror it holds up to his own predatory, exploitative nature as a 'charismatic' middle school teacher. But one of the things about <i>Lolita</i> is that we're in the head of Humbert Humbert and so we have to see Lo through his skin-crawlingly sexual gaze - a place I couldn't bear to be when I tried re-reading the book in the last few years. JCO takes her time but she eventually overturns that power structure of who owns the narrative. Without giving away spoilers, this extends the story we know and turns it into a different direction. But, being JCO, there's no easy 'happy' ending.

Despite - eventually - seeing what this book does, it feels overlong with the prose being more slap-dash than JCO's usual controlled precision. This feels like it needs another focused edit and has been published too early. That said, I loved the section written from the point of view of someone's dog joyously defying her human! And the denouement is structurally interesting. But JCO has spent her career writing about how harsh the world is for girls and women; in writing about power differentials and how they exploit the vulnerable - other books of hers have made the same points as this one more forcefully and elegantly, and in fewer pages. Still, we can't have too many books alerting us to the predators who operate below the radar and the systems that they exploit for cover. JCO's renewed focus on the victims and a sense of agency, however perverted, make this worth a read despite the flaws.