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    The Sacrifice: A Novel
    The Sacrifice: A Novel
    The Sacrifice: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Sacrifice: A Novel

    Written by Joyce Carol Oates

    Narrated by Bahni Turpin, Sisi Aisha Johnson, Karole Foreman and Adam Lazzarre-White

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.

    When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society. In such a tense, charged atmosphere, Oates reveals that there must always be a sacrifice—of innocence, truth, trust, and, ultimately, of lives. Unfolding in a succession of multiracial voices, in a community transfixed by this alleged crime and the spectacle unfolding around it, this profound novel exposes what—and who—the “sacrifice” actually is, and what consequences these kind of events hold for us all.

    Working at the height of her powers, Oates offers a sympathetic portrait of the young girl and her mother, and challenges our expectations and beliefs about our society, our biases, and ourselves. As the chorus of its voices—from the police to the media to the victim and her family—reaches a crescendo, The Sacrifice offers a shocking new understanding of power and oppression, innocence and guilt, truth and sensationalism, justice and retribution.

    A chilling exploration of complex social, political, and moral themes—the enduring trauma of the past, modern racial and class tensions, the power of secrets, and the primal decisions we all make to protect those we love—The Sacrifice is a major work of fiction from one of our most revered literary masters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 27, 2015
    ISBN9780062372390
    The Sacrifice: A Novel
    Author

    Joyce Carol Oates

    Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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    Reviews for The Sacrifice

    3.5/5

    53 ratings7 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Sixteen minutes in and this publication is RIFE with cringy disparaging stereotypes of fat black women. I have always like JCO but she needs to not write about us in this manner. I’m offended and depressed.
    • 4/5
      Count the Sacrifices

      As reviewers have pointed out, Joyce Carol Oates has patterned The Sacrifice after the real-life case of Tawana Brawley. In November 1987, Brawley claimed to have been raped and ravaged by white cops and an assistant D.A. The crime allegedly occurred near her home in the small up-state New York town of Wappingers Falls. The case garnered national attention, particularly for its nature and the media noise created by Al Sharpton, and attorneys Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason. Ultimately, a grand jury found all charges groundless. The defamed assistant D.A. sued the parties for defamation, won, collected from Sharpton, and continues to collect from the others, including Brawley.

      In JCO’s treatment, the action transfers to an invented town near Passaic, NJ, and Newark, probably to take dramatic advantage of the population density, history of racial animosity, and brutal police tactics (all much more muted by comparison in a small, rural town). The girl, Sybilla Frye, is 15. Her mother, Ednetta, discovers her in an abandoned fish factory in defiled condition, exactly like Brawley. And like Brawley, Sybilla refuses to cooperate with police. Her mother, Ednetta, shields her as best she can, until the Rev. Marus Mudrick and his meeker and more cautious lawyer brother Byron assume control. Near riots ensure. The racial divide widens and deepens. Discharged and trouble rookie cop Jerold Zahn has his honor and memory defamed posthumously. In the end, it’s all in service of a lie by a girl and her mother afraid of her brutal father, a man who regularly beat her, and a preacher who sought fame for himself.

      JCO does an excellent job of helping us onlookers understand the hellishness of living in a segregated town, in near-destitute poverty, surrounded by constant brutally, within families, between neighbors, and imposed by the authorities. What’s sacrificed here is civility, humanity, and hope. (For a more academic appreciation of how this works, you might try On the Run, a book with methodology flaws but nonetheless enlightening for many.)

      There are more sacrifices here, too. Justice gets dumped in favor of personal gain and, yes, visibility for a race relations problem people try to ignore, by the Rev. and his brother. A young officer suffering mentally over his self-perceived failure to succeed as a cop sacrifices, unknowingly, the rest of his pride and honor after death, and his family is put through emotional hell. Also sacrificed, attempts at achieving any kind of understanding and reconciliation between the police and those they are supposed to safeguard. Though brutal and the true cause of the conflicts, the father, Anis Schutt, from anger and fright, sacrifices himself by choosing a blazing and vindictive gun battle end to his life. And, of course, Ednetta and Sybilla sacrifice themselves on an altar to a cause and to greed out of fear.
    • 4/5
      Joyce Carol Oates clearly regards the old adage to “write what you know” in some contempt. While her new novel is set in her native New Jersey, the protagonists range from a police detective of Hispanic ancestry to an African American teenage girl living in a poverty-ravaged neighborhood in Biscayne.

      At the opening of the book, Ednetta Frye searches frantically for her missing daughter, Sybilla. Sybilla will be found in the basement of a derelict factory, bound and battered. Her story of what happened to her, as well as her mother’s reaction, will lay bare the ever simmering racial tension still present in the late 1980s in a city deeply affected and still scarred by riots twenty years earlier.

      Although it proceeds at a breakneck pace, this is a hard book to read. Oates does not shy away from the dark underside of human behavior and here there is no victim who is entirely free of blame. I’m not entirely sure what to think about this book, that creates villains only to humanize them, and never hesitates to look at complicated and muddy situations. I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading her previous novel with a similar theme, them, sometime soon.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A teenage black girl is found in an abandoned building in New Jersey. She has been beaten and sexually abused; racist phrases are written on her body. Her Mother has been looking for her for days. At the hospital, she says she was abducted by white police, gang raped and beaten across a few days, then left to die. But her story doesn't add up.

      As the police try to investigate, the girl and her Mother refuse to cooperate. Eventually, she becomes an icon of white police abuse against the black community, the story growing as more donations come in, regardless of the truth of the allegations.

      Written in Joyce Carol Oates' unique voice, The Sacrifice is a thought-provoking read. It is a story that delves into the relationship between a mother and daughter who live in poverty, trying to survive in a tough neighborhood. It is also about the distrust of a community of the police, and the exploitation of a teenager by radical religious organizations for attention and money-making.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Oh wow, Joyce Carol Oates sure can write! Set in a rundown New Jersey city in the 80s, the novel begins with a missing Black teen, Sybilla, discovered in a destitute house, the apparent victim of a hideous rape/ attack, the perpetrators apparently a group of white cops.
      We're never entirely convinced on this one. The sullen daughter and her slightly off-kilter mother seem reluctant to engage with the authorities to get justice. Though as theyre taken up by a self-seeking Black activist, his observation that "tellin that poor ravaged girl to go to the po-lice is like tellin Jews to appeal to the Nazi Fuhrer", gives us pause for thought.
      The clever thing, for me, is that even as we fail to warm to foul mouthed Syibilla, her mother, murderous stepfather, the corrupt 'Reverend' pushing their cause...and even as we don't buy their tale and rather like the whites who come into it...we still have a sympathy for their plight after decades of police racism, and given the rotten life Sybilla is born into.
      The other clever thing is that exactly WHO is the sacrifice is very much up for discussion. There are a number of potential characters, black and white...there is no easy answer to any of it, it's awash with grey areas.
      One of the best authors out there.
    • 5/5
      Another great book by Joyce Carol Oates. In this one, she tackles the issue of sacrificial lambs, victimhood and poverty, set in the very topical context of racism -- specifically when it comes to the justice/policing systems. Sybilla Frye is found nearly dead after being sexually assaulted by (she claims) "white cops". Her story may or may not be true...some things don't seem to add up. But she is definitely a victim of abuse, neglect, poverty and exploitation by people who have their own agendas. Sybilla's best interests are sacrificed to these agendas. And, she is not the only person sacrificed in the search for truth, or in the attempts to cover it up. Very nuanced approach to so many issues and characters....amazing.
    • 4/5
      My first read by this author. I very much enjoyed her style of writing. I may have to try some of her other books!
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