Joyce Carol Oates

A family of six disintegrates after a daughter is raped by a high-school student. It happens to the wealthy Mulvaneys in upstate New York. The disgrace--there is some question if it was rape--sends the father to drink and financial ruin, the girl leaves home, the others follow. By the author of What I Lived For.

We were the Mulvaneys

Ryan Mateyk

THIS BOOK.

This book is brutal. It's about a horrific act and the subsequent destruction caused to the Mulvaney family. But is it possible for them to rebuild their broken relationship? Reading this book is like having your head held underwater and when you finally make your way to the surface for a breath, you're pushed under again. It's brutal but necessary and incredible.

Veronica Overholt

Daryl Houston

It's a very slow, sometimes almost tedious read, but it's so remarkably detailed in how it builds up the characters. I think it sags for a while after about the midpoint, and for all that the characters are portrayed complexly, their actions aren't always all that believable to me. The book deals very much in appearances, and the story is told through the voice of a narrator who was young for much of the story's crisis and is retelling it at a distance, having in fact not been present for most of the specific events whose reality rings a bit false for me, so maybe Oates is doing something here with the reliability of the narrator, and these things that are registering for me as lapses in reality are intentional. In any case, it's a nice piece of writing, basically exactly the sort of stuff that Franzen tries to write (in fact, I feel like Freedom maybe owes a little something to this book), but so much better in Oates's hands.

We were the Mulvaneys

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