Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

Wuthering Bites Book Club Review at a Glance

What We Said

Our book club loved this book. We found it brilliant and compulsively readable. Each character has their own unique qualities - especially Legs, who is one of the more memorable characters we've read. It is a sincere, action packed, and thought provoking book. It has strong female characters and the theme of their empowerment is unforgettable. The bonding of the characters and their gang of loyalty to one another was inspiring. We were almost envious of their strong bond. We liked it so much we even took a 'field trip' to attend the premiere of the movie here in Seattle (We loved the movie too, but most critics panned it. The character of Legs was very well-cast). It is a book we recommend heartily.
-Sue

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Joyce Carol Oates is the author of twenty-three novels and many volumes of short stores, poems, and essays, as well as plays. She has received international acclaim for her writing and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Lotus Club, a National Book Award for fiction, several O. Henry awards, and the Rea Award for achievement in the short story. Her most recent work includes Heat and Other Stores and Black Water, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

• Foxfire - Confessions of a Girl Gang
• Black Water
• I Lock My Door Upon Myself
• Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
• American Appetites
• You Must Remember This
• Marya: A Life
• Solstice
• Mysteries of Winterthurn
• A Bloodsmoor Romance
• Angel of Light
• Bellefleur
• Unholy Loves
• Cybele
• Son of the Morning
• Childwold
• The Assassins
• Do With Me What You Will
• Wonderland
• them
• Expensive People
• A Garden of Earthly Delights
• With Shuddering Fall
• We Were the Mulvaneys

From the Publisher

The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls are joined in a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world they never made -- a world that seems made to denigrate and destroy them.
Foxfire is Joyce Carol Oates' strongest and most unsparing novel yet...an often engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. Here, then, are the Foxfire chronicles -- the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of lechers and oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last. It is the story of Maddy Monkey, who writes it...of Goldie, whose womanly body masks a fierce, explosive temper...of Lana, with her Marilyn Monroe hair and packs of Chesterfields...of timid Rita, whose humiliation leads to the first act of Foxfire revenge. 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. The story moves over the years from the first eruption of adolescent anger at sexual abuse to a shared life financed by luring predatory men into traps baited with sex. But then the gang's very success leads to disaster -- as Foxfire makes a last tragic stand against a society intent on swallowing it up. Yet amid scenes of violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and vengeance lies this novel's greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the girls of Foxfire together -- especially that betweenMaddy, the teller of the tale, and Legs, whose quintessential strength and bedrock bravery make her one of the most vivid and vital heroines in modern fiction.