This was a haunting series of stories by Joyce Carol Oates. I love that she can take a story and turn it on it's head to something resonant and utterly beguiling at the same time. These four stories really exemplify the utter craft of this author. Thanks for the ARC, Net Galley.

Four novellas each with a young vulnerable woman and a shocking crime at it's core. Each told with Oates deceptively simple style which draws you in until the story is impossible to put down. In Cardiff by the Sea, a young art historian is bequeathed a house by a long lost relative. Delving into her ancestry, she uncovers a family secret which turns her world upside down Told with gothic imagery cobwebs are literally and figuratively all over this gripping tale unravelling one family's hidden past.

Miao Dao is the pet cat of a lonely teenage girl who is also dealing with a difficult family setting. The bond she forms with the feral cat is touching and rewarded in a very surprising way.

Phantomwise 1972 a young student of philosophy and poetry finds herself in a difficult situation with a shocking outcome. Oates used this story to include some poetry and says that 'in poetry you chisel the most beautiful words out of language, in life you stutter in words'. There is nothing stuttering about the language Oates uses to craft this gripping tale.

In The Surviving Child, another tragedy haunts a vulnerable young woman as she deals with the consequences of a suicide. The death of a poet affords Oates the opportunity to include some more poetry and some beautiful poetry too.

Each story is told well as we have come to expect from Oates, unravelled slowly and carefully with empathy for the central character garnered through subtle detail. One caveat is that reading the novellas in quick succession is ill-advised. It almost creates a negative expectancy and encourages comparison of characters and circumstance.

However, as individual novellas, these are masterpieces of the genre told with just the right pace and detail to keep the reader gripped. Oates is a master of her craft.

The creep factor is real here. I enjoy reading Joyce Carol Oates, and this was a selection of four mini stories.

Cardiff, by the Sea - struck me as vague, like reading through fog. Good story, not my favorite style.

Mia Dao - story about a girl and a feral cat - this was my favorite.

Phantomwise: 1972 - pedophile undertones that I didn’t like at all.

The Surviving Child - good creepy story.

Not my favorite by JCO but I did enjoy the read.

Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publishers For an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

This collection of 4 novellas is a haunting exploration of control, power, male/female dynamics, vulnerability, and violence. They were difficult to read because they were such an honest portrayal of harrowing topics like abortion, violence, abuse, abandonment, etc. The writing is impeccable - crisp, precise, and descriptive when it needed to be - making me want to read more by this author.

Cardiff, by the Sea:
I was drawn into this story about a woman seeking out answers about her past. When she travels to her newly discovered birth family’s hometown, she uncovers layers of trauma. The story was haunting, but, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure that I understood the ending of it.

Miao Dao:
Another powerful story about power and control. Mia, the teenage protagonist, is suddenly caught up in a world where the male gaze terrifies her, forcing her to change the way she interacts with the world and to revise how she sees herself. However, her relationship with a feral cat, who comes to symbolize her ability to fight back, helps her survive. This was a difficult story to read in that Mia feels so helpless, often accusing herself of being at fault for the harassment she suffers. However, the story rings true.

Phantomwise: 1972
The third novella in this collection plays off the recurring theme of control. A young female university student somehow finds herself in dangerous relationships with male professors. Eerie ending.

The Surviving Child:
Like the other stories, this one focuses on the vulnerable. A young woman marries a widower whose feminist wife killed herself and her daughter, but the new husband and the surviving son are not all that they seem to be.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the great writers of our time. It is as if instead of taking a breath she has to write a sentence. She is prolific yet the quality of her writing remains solid, challenging, relevant and intense. She certainly can't be pigeonholed into a particular genre and has more than one string to her writing bow so to speak.

Cardiff, by the sea is a collection of 4 novellas with a strong sense of feminism running through all 4. The truly outstanding one of the collection is the Cardiff, by the sea. A young woman is contacted by a solicitor to inform her she has inherited some property. She knows little of her past as she was adopted as a young child, she returns to her birth family only to find a dark family history. There are mulitiple layers to the story tellling and it is an absolute joy to read. We then have Mia Dao which deals with a young girl trying to protect herself from the male predatory gaze, it has a quality of supernatural to the writing, as does the next novella Phan-tomwise 1972. Finally we have The Surviving Child which has at it's centred a young woman who has become the stepmother to a boy whose mother was a famous poet, he survived her attempt to kill herself and her children.

These are dark, psychological novels, relevant to the lives of women past and present. A must read for anyone who thrives on great writing and great fiction.

I received this book from Netflix in exchange for an honest review.

This is a collection of four novellas from Joyce Carol Oates. They novellas consist of the following:
Cardiff, by the sea: Clare, a 30 year old researcher who was adopted as a young child, finds herself drawn back to her biological family after receiving an inheritance, but the family may not be all that they seem to be. This story felt quite gothic, as Clare starts finding out about her family of origin, things don’t seem to be quite as they appear on the surface and she starts questioning her own thoughts and feelings as she looks into her family history.

Miao Dao: A young girl, on the brink of puberty experiences massive upheaval in her life as everything starts to change, with the only constant comfort in her life being a once feral cat that she has adopted

Phantom wise:1972: A young woman, studying at university, struggles when a romantic dalliance goes too far, possibly against her will. She tries to solve her issues, haunted by the refrain of a poem.

The surviving child: a new stepmother tries to make a success of her new blended family, while connecting with her new stepson, who is the surviving child of the title, after he has survived the tragic loss of his mother. But is everything as it seems on the surface, or is she going slowly mad?


I’ve read several books by Joyce Carol Oates, and I love her writing, but I find it to be quite an intense experience. Her writing pulls you into the story and is very absorbing, while often feeling uncomfortable, which I think is a great skill - there aren’t many authors who can have that effect on their readers, in my experience. This book is no different, being a collection of compelling novellas, dealing with themes of troubled romance, death, life and the undercurrents in life - how people relate to each other, even when they change from who they once were. Dark tales, uncomfortable at times, but the writing is spectacular and memorable. I kept going back to reread parts as the writing was just beautiful. Amazing book.

I always enjoy books by this author. This book was no different. I enjoyed the characters and the mini stories. I don't always agree with what I personally find are some stereotypes of gender and gender relations but I enjoyed the stories. I cannot say that this was my favorite most entertaining book of the summer but overall I enjoyed it. Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced reader copy.

The day I chose to read this book Joyce Carol Oates was actually in the news. Quite random, quite a coincidence, really. And what she did to get in the news is post a stupid tweet. Now I’m not going to turn this review into a tirade about the evils of twitter, because while, like most social media, it is absolutely an evil thing that gives platform to the levels of stupidity that not so long ago were private and /or geographically restricted to the stupids’ immediate radius and yes twitter is one of major signifiers of civilizations’ backwards tumble into abyss and all that…it doesn’t actually seem to preclude anyone from twittering away. Apparently everyone needs a soap box, a platform for their ignorance and vitriol to spew forth into the world. Such as a respected author who took it upon herself to post an obnoxiously rude snippy comment on something as innocuous as Anderson Cooper’s son’s birth announcement. The reason being Oates’ specific kind of feminism got offended by Cooper omitting to mention the surrogate mother. Seriously. Because it’s her business. Seriously. For me it’s like this…the wealthy, the famous, the 1% seem to buy nice things all the time without mentioning their provenance, I wouldn’t expect Cooper to announce who incubated his baby for him any more than I would expect him to announce who build his mansion for him or who cooks his meals. I don’t even know why he needs to announce he bought a baby, but privacy is dead and people can’t shut up about themselves, so there we are. Plus there’s also a fact that surrogacy is to my understanding a private matter and someone might not want to be known as the baby incubator for pay. So then why does Joyce Carol Oates have such a need to defend this woman who must likely needs no defending? Because Oates seems to be practicing a very specific kind of feminism, the toxic kind. Am I coining toxic feminism here? Seems unlikely, but would be awesome if that’s the case. Mind you, I’m not in any way against feminism, the kind that promotes equality and recognition and all that, but when it gets perverted into a manhating one track minded obsessive sort of mission to find real or imaginary oppression in every single place…that’s disturbing. Offputting. Wrong. And it is exactly this kind of feminism that informs Oates’ literary output and so, as much as I actually like her as an author, it does circumspect the enjoyment of her work. These novellas are as well written tales of dark psychological drama as you can find, but they all have a certain similarity in the way the gender politics are presented. And so whether her protagonist is an adopted woman coming to Cardiff to discover her biological family or a young girl, barely a teenager, dealing with puberty and her creepy peado stepdad or a college age woman getting involved with her professors or a woman marrying a wealthy older man with a son who survived being murdered by his own mother…the theme is the same, the message is the same, men are predators, women are victims. Every single time. Men are rapists, liars, murderers. Women are raped, lied to, murdered. It’s a very disturbing sort of one note eulogy for the genders. At least Oates only deals with the two traditional (sisgender) ones, who knows what sort of a gory feast she’d have with the gendermultiverse of the modern day. Or maybe she wouldn’t, maybe that would be too complex and she seems to prefer the simplicity of the wicked perpetrator/victim duality of her imaginings. Shame really, because she’s such a talented author and has a real knack for profoundly disturbing and occasionally psychologically terrorizing the readers. It’s just difficult to enjoy something so bluntly message driven when a message is so…well, this. And there’s that quality to Oates’ writing too, it’s difficult to describe, but it’s viscerally unpleasant at times, like walking through a cobweb. Not necessarily a terrible thing, in fact it proves her effectiveness as an inventor of psychological disturbances of the mind, but still, it’s there. These aren’t easy books to love, there are books I don’t think I can ever love, admire, like, appreciate, sure, but never love. The second story was actually a revisit for me, I previously listened to it through Amazon shorts audio series and though I remembered most of it, it was still good the second time around. Oates definitely can write. Just imagine how good she might have been had she done her writing away from the soap box. And yes, I realize I spent much of this review on stating a personal opinion decrying the evils of a platform for personal opinions, but hey…if you can’t tell a difference between a handcrafted thought laden eloquent (one hopes) thought included in a review that is meant mostly for me (personal reading records) and whoever might enjoy it in this relatively small reading community of ours, but addressed to no one and a creatively spelled 280 character idiocy launched into the world at large and so often as a personal attack at random people…well, than, let’s face it, you might belong on twitter. For all others, thank you for reading and have a lovely day. Despite some enjoyment reading of this book might provide to the right audience in the right mood, it isn’t an easy one to recommend. Use your own discernment, as you always ought to anyway. Thanks Netgalley.