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    Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
    Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
    Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

    Written by Joyce Carol Oates

    Narrated by Jane Gabbert

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates’s strongest and most unsparing novel yet—an always engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. 

    The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls join a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world that seems made to denigrate and destroy them.

    Here is the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of male oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last. Above all, it is the story of Legs Sadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle, hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire: its guiding spirit, its burning core.

    At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride of a novel—charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion. Amid scenes of violence and vengeance lies this novel’s greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the Foxfire girls together. Foxfire reaffirms Joyce Carol Oates’s place at the very summit of American writing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Audio
    Release dateSep 17, 2008
    ISBN9781598876086
    Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
    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 Foxfire

    3.5/5

    284 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A great and daring novel.
    • 4/5
      I have often found Oates to be rambling and wordy, but not here. This is a well-constructed and gripping story of a group of angry teenage girls in upstate New York. The characters are sympathetic and the action is all to believable.
    • 2/5
      Every patriarchal society I'm familiar with has an obsessive fear of women on the edge. A good woman in a patriarchal society accepts her place as a vessel for others and the abuse at the hands of men that this entails without complaint. She does not express her displeasure or her wish for a different way. She certainly does not respond with violence. As a result, women who do -- or women on the edge of doing so -- upset the natural order. It scares people.

      This has been true as far back as Maenads, the mad female followers of Dionysus whose anger was wrapped up with their sexuality. They were mad because they rejected the role of woman as wife and mother and instead pursued sexual pleasure -- some of the worst things women can do in a patriarchal society. These were the classical women in a frenzy. We see this today, too -- have you ever seen the show Snapped or wondered why society is so much more fascinated by female serial killers than male? Foxfire presents the 1950s incarnation of this idea.

      From the beginning of Foxfire, women's anger and sexuality come closely intertwined. In chapter five, just forty pages into my copy, the girls undertake an orgiastic initiation ceremony replete with shirts being torn off, exposed breasts, passionate kisses, even smearing blood on each other and licking it off. Lots of breasts, lots of licking.

      This is not a thing that women do to each other in real life. It hardly seems like something written by a woman; it seems like the kind of sleepover fantasy a perverted man who knows nothing about teenage girls would envision. And it's titillating. The point of the scene is not to express women's solidarity with each other but to titillate, that cross between eroticism and fear that women in a frenzy inspires.

      There's a strange strand to this book that I wasn't sure how to interpret. The book simultaneously glamorizes and warns against women forging their own path. Their gang is forged through an unreal sexual frenzy that of course spells disaster. The Foxfire girls are to be admired, but they are also dangerous. Their gripes against the violence of the men around them are valid, but they are also to blame for their victimization.

      It's as though Joyce Carol Oates couldn't decide about feminism: is it good or is it damaging? I wrestled with this question the whole time. And I'll admit that this is colored by the past Oates books I've read, We Were the Mulvaneys and A Fair Maiden, both of which had troubling views of sexual assault and blame. For her, feminism seems to be more a nice jaunt for a teenager or college girl that should be swiftly abandoned in favor of marriage and family. To her, feminism's limit approaches only misandry, so it may be safe to be toyed with but is definitively not safe to adopt long-term. This becomes cartoonishly true toward the end of Foxfire, where all men are declared the enemy and these frenzied women go too far.

      Because that's what this is about: WOMEN in a FRENZY who GO TOO FAR. It is not, notably, about the men who sexually assault Rita and Maddy, or attempt to do so; this is seen as morally wrong but somehow expected of men. It is about women who are righteously mad who lose the legitimacy of their anger through their insistence on feminism and communism. Don't these women realize that they can be mad but should eventually just accept their place?

      Not recommended.
    • 4/5
      They are poor, living in the wrong side of town, mostly from broken homes. But most of all they are girls, constantly objectified by men – from the groping and yells of the boys their own age to the scary sexuality of the adults. But gathering around the charismatic, unpredictable Legs, five girls form a gang. Not just a group or a club – a Gang, just like the ones the working class guys have. And after Foxfire is formed, there is no stopping them. They are about the get their revenge, on the whole world.

      Several people drew parallels between this book and a play I wrote this spring, which made me curious to read it. I find JCO is very much a hit and miss writer for me (the Blondes are few and far between!), so I didn’t really know what to expect. But this high paced YA book was very much a hit, and the comparison to my play is flattering indeed.

      Not really plot-driven, OR character driven, this book is instead thrust forward by a form of restless anger. The episodes told seem almost random, gaps are left, ideas flare up and pass. But the picture painted of a small town in America in the fifties, with any amount of dirt hiding just under the surface, and the girls who suddenly refuse to waddle in that dirt, is a punch in the guts of a book, engrossing, fast, intoxicating.

      The ending is over the top, perhaps, and rather unlikely, but in it’s context it works. I’m with Legs, Monkey, Boom-Boom and the rest of them to the very end, and am sorry to let go.
    • 4/5
      There's a lot about "Foxfire" that'll be pretty familiar to Joyce Carol Oates fans. It's set in upstate New York in the fifties, and it explores the social and personal tensions that simmered under that decade's sunny surface. Oates's prose, which is sometimes too careful and fussily crafted for my taste, is freer and more sensual here, capturing both the wildness of her protagonists' youth and the sexual tensions they seem to feel but can't articulate. "Foxfire" will doubtlessly seem sort of quaint to some readers: it features greasers and big cars and gang activity that, while shocking enough in context, isn't half as frightening as what would follow two or three decades later. Still, Oates, even as she writes from the vantage point of the mid-nineties, Oates skilfully keeps "Foxfire" from devolving into period kitsch. Her characters, who don't hesitate to share their rawest emotions with each other, feel genuinely scared and adrift, and Oates emphasizes the tenuousness of their survival and the difficulty of the choices they face. A lot of political parallels can probably be drawn to what might be described as an experiment in all-female communal living and social revolution, and Oates's portrayal of their troubled lives does, in a sense, have a more pointedly political edge than I would have expected from her. To analyze it from a political standpoint with the benefit of hindsight would miss, I think, what "Foxfire" accomplishes. A frame tale co-written by one of the gang's former members, it is, like many of Joyce Carol Oates's novels, a wonderful example of how even fictional narratives can make too-familiar history seem vital and alive. Oates, to her credit, writes like someone who considers the preservation of her characters' memories to be her highest calling. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      Pretty good
    • 4/5
      This novel is a fictionalized account of an all-female gang that forms in a working class community in upstate New York. The gang, Foxfire, is founded by a group of girls who've all suffered alientation and lack of parental attention. The girls share a sense of being alienated and restricted from any sort of real social benefits or meaningful relationships becuase of their age, gender, economic status, and family situation. The gang is formed, and begins, by using public humilation and minor violence to bring justice to local men who have abused the privileges of their gender. Quickly, though, their activities escalate, and it becomes clear that the gang is on a path to self-destruction. This book was a bit hard to get into at first because its written in the tone and style of one of the gang's members, but the writing becomes engrossing. Oates truly takes on the tone and spirit of a teenage girl gang. While this is part of what makes the book hard to get into, it ultimately makes for an engrossing story. It is striking just how anti-male Foxfire's violence is, and the book seems to suggest that this is one of the myriad of social responses to a world in which girls are expendable objects, sexualized, and undervalued. Indeed, Oates invites the reader to consider the gang and it's activities as part of a continuum of responses that individuals in a depressed, sexist, and emotionally alienated society might produce. The book is as much a critique of the word that made Foxfire possible as it is a narration of the gang's activities. While Oates does not excuse the violence she clearly assigns broader culpability to the world in which these girls live.
    • 5/5
      I read this in high school -- about the same age as the characters -- and liked it a great deal. It was probably the "hardest" book I read at that age that wasn't for school. I enjoyed challenging myself and reading about characters that we both like me (age, gender) and yet very different (different era, different values). I'd definitely recommend to a teenager and I think adults may enjoy it as well.
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