May Meeting - The Gravedigger's Daughter

Hi... Please join us for our May meeting where we'll be discussing "The Gravedigger's Daughter" by Joyce Carol Oates. As usual, the host will provide drinks, coffee, etc. and the rest of us will contribute snacks. Our past meetings have featured lively discussions and a good time getting to know each other.

A little about the book:

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Some of Oates' novels are tightly focused; others cover a larger social canvas. he Gravedigger's Daughter is a hybrid of the two. Set in Oates country (poor, working-class, rural New York State), it is a first-person tale told from Oates' signature point of view, that of a young woman in peril, and encompasses one immigrant family's tragedies during the Holocaust. Oates' intense narrator is born on the boat that carried her parents away from Nazi Germany, so Rebecca has never seen her parents happy. All she knows is the gloom of their mausoleumlike stone hovel beside the cemetery her father maintains. Oates evokes the bleak horrors of Thomas Hardy in scenes of suffering and denial as Rebecca's increasingly enraged father insists that they are not Jewish, even as her mother grieves over lost relatives. Madness and bloodshed erupt, and Rebecca is left alone in the world, destitute and uneducated. But she is smart and very strong, surviving her passionate liaison with Niles Tignor, one of Oates' most seductive and diabolical outlaws, and finding her calling in caring for her son, a musical prodigy. Oates is supremely atmospheric, erotic, and suspenseful in this virtuoso novel of identity, power, and moral reckoning.