Helpful Score: 3
There's no doubt Joyce Carol Oates is an amazing author, and while I'm usually a fan of her works, I found this book hard to commit to and put it down after the first few stories. It might very well be that I'm simply not a fan of short stories - I'd rather read a long sprawling Oates work - in general. The writing is elegant and the stories are well-constructed as you'd expect from Oates, but beware that this book contains 21 short stories rather than an in-depth full-feature work.
