Once again Joyce Carol Oates has written a compelling story. I thoroughly enjoyed Babysitter. Her main character is interesting. I am fascinated by the choices she makes. It was also eye opening to see how society acted towards different characters based on race and class.

Joyce Carol Oates meets Stephen King—that is what you can expect in “Babysitter”. Oates intertwines the lives of individuals in 1970s Detroit suburbs. Hannah, the protagonist, is a wealthy housewife who feels invisible and unfulfilled. She starts an affair with a mysterious businessman. But the affair goes awry and Hannah is forever changed. This is one storyline. The other storyline is the abduction and subsequent murders of children in Detroit.Hannah fears that she will lose her children to this serial killer. Little does she know how close she is to this killer because of her affair. Oates explores violence and pleasure. She once again explores the sexual vulnerability of women in the 70s male dominated society.

This was a difficult read—sometimes because of the convoluted plot, the repetition of characters’ thoughts, and the sexual violence. The reader has to work hard to understand whether the events are really happening or whether there is a supernatural element. The plot picks up pace In the last quarter of the novel, but it is a long haul until that point.

Because of the mature subject matter and challenging style, I cannot recommend this to students. I am appreciative of NetGalley and Knopf for the advanced reader copy.

3.5 stars
WHEW. That was a ride. Wow. Okay. I'm not sure where I should begin. I guess I should start with room 6183, as Hannah does in the first chapter. This hotel room will come up again and again, as Hannah moves through what is most likely a midlife crisis. Upper class, privileged, with a TON of unpacked trauma from her childhood, Hannah begins an affair with a stranger while a serial killer dubbed the Babysitter is murdering young children around Detroit. An insufferable character, we follow Hannah throughout the story, and we scream at Hannah as her decisions inevitably bring her closer and closer to dangerous situations. She repeatedly receives gratification from extreme abuse, of which this book is not lacking. (CW: sexual assault, pedophilia, murder, murder of a child). The description of the sexual assault is brutal and very, very hard to read. However, it's written SO ACCURATELY. I don't know how I felt about this book, and I'm not sure that I will for a while. This doesn't mean that I didn't think it was extremely well-written. Read with caution.

I've tried this book as an e-book and I've now tried it (and finished it) as an audiobook.
And this one was just not my cup of tea.

I found the MC frustrating. It's stream of consciousness writing (my least favorite) and she just rambles on and on about an affair she having and how she's going to be punished for it through her children and that she'a bad mother and bad wife and everyone hates her and no one is nice. . .etc. She even flashes back to daddy issues about how he didn't love her and smoked cigars and her mother was just submisitive to him (like she needs to be both to this person she's having an affair with and her husband).

There were flashes (and a male author) about the serial killer and these kids disappearing but it all seemed like a side plot. The MC could barely see past herself to the mysteries around her and once she finally starting putting the pieces together, I just didn't care anymore.
I wish I'd liked it more but this one was a miss for me.

A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.

For such a horrible topic I really enjoyed the book. I’ve been “into” true crime for a while but had never heard of this.

One word: Insufferable.

This book was a migraine in disguise. Resentful characters, a chaotic timeline that runs back and forth, tedious descriptions, annoying usage of parentheses and a frustratingly slow pace; I struggled through this book and if not for my OCD of finishing off books, I’d have abandoned this soon after I started reading it.

Hannah is an unhappy (white) (thirty-nine-year-old) wife of a rich (white) businessman who is having an (extramarital) affair with a man she met at one of the fundraisers organised by her. Despite her (self-loathing) fearfulness that this affair would make God punish her (for she has sinned) by taking away her children, she continues with the affair. She has had a traumatic childhood which is never quite revealed in the book, but based on her disjointed memory flashes, we know that she had a troubled relationship with her parents. She is a submissive wife (to her husband) and lover (to her lover), an anxious (bad) mother and a restless (spineless) woman. 80% of the book is about Hannah - sometimes hating herself and other times, hating everyone around her. The remaining 20% is about a serial killer, known popularly as the Babysitter, who kills children (mostly boys) who are poor and unloved (usually orphaned or those with uncaring parents). As the Babysitter starts preying closer to Hannah’s home, an (even more) anxious Hannah starts to make some connections.

This might sound like a mystery thriller but it is not. Not by a mile. It is about a (pathetic) self-centred woman who thinks everything is about her. The waiter addresses her as ‘Ma’am’ because he must be ridiculing her for her age, race, or whatever. The housekeeper doesn’t answer her back because she is pretending to be submissive to her white owner. Her husband hasn’t taken her call because he must be avoiding her, maybe planning a divorce. Hannah is an insufferable pretentious woman with whom I felt no connection and just couldn’t sympathise.

I knew this book was a mistake from the first page. I still read it. Suffered it. The writing style was difficult to follow - confusing - like a fever dream. The descriptions are too long drawn with tiny (boring) details that make no sense, other than to make the overall experience a pain. In the end, I want to apologise for my unforgivable usage of parentheses in this review, but this is only a preview of what the actual book looks like.

Overall, a miserable book. Not recommended.

Thanks to Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my review.
Babysitter is now available for purchase.

1.5/5🌟(rounding down).

TW: Racism, Sexism, Infidelity, Rape, Child Abuse, Bad Parenting, Alcohol and Substance Abuse.

The Babysitter, is downright terrifying and I could not asked for more!

Joyce Carol Oates has the gift for writing and The Babysitter, has surpassed any and all expectations.

This book is DARK! There were quite a few times I had tried to put the book down to give myself a breather but within in an instant, I was picking it back up to keep going. I had to remind myself numerous times to "breathe" and to answer your question, yes, it is THAT intense.

As you can probably tell by my past reviews, I am a total sucker for all things thriller but what I love even more is when an author can put a true crime "like" , twist on the book. The Babysitter, was just that. It felt incredibly real and as I read along, I became invested in finding out who was kidnapping and killing these kids!

I have to tell you, naming the serial killer "The Babysitter" was just downright soul sucking. I was incredibly scared and could not stop thinking about this book long after I concluded. If you are looking for nightmares, step right up. The Babysitter, delivers.

FIVE STARS!

2.5 ⭐️‘s
While parts of this book were very well executed … others were not. Overly long, tedious and confusing, this was definitely not one of her best. With a puzzle that never came together and an ending that was unsatisfactory, this is one I won’t be pondering over for long! Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for an ARC of this book.

I've been meaning to read Joyce Carol Oates for a long time now, and she's had such a long and prolific career that I never know where to start. Luckily she wrote this new book and made the decision a little easier for me. I enjoyed this read. Some parts were a little verbose and more drawn out than they really needed to be, but I can see why she's such a respected voice in the industry.

3 Stars
I have read other books by Joyce Carol Oates before and have been engaged. This book had much to involve the reader but it also did not follow the blurb as I had thought it would.

The crafting, the conflicts, and the horrors are there but there are also things that I personally am not drawn to, so it was a bit difficult for me.

In the 1970s in Detroit there were a series of child abductions and eventually the children were murdered. The abductor was dubbed the Babysitter. Earlier in the decade there had been race riots in Detroit and the city earned the name of “murder capital of the US”. The author was living in that area at the time and remembered the horror of it all. So she wrote a story about the lives of people living in the white upper class suburbs outside the city as well as the blacks living in the inner city of Detroit who were all affected by the abductions.
The main character, Hannah, was a bored housewife trapped in a loveless marriage. She met a mysterious man at a charity event and soon embarked on a disastrous affair with him. The book deals with rape, sexual abuse, pedophiles, police brutality and race relations. Many of the descriptions of violence are graphic and may disturb some readers. However the book is well written and the stories are memorable.
I received this ARC from the publisher and Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

I had to DNF this one. I just couldn’t get through it and was expecting a completely different story based on the synopsis. Hannah was incredibly boring and I can’t get behind her part of the story. Rated one star because this just didn’t do it for me.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I normally love Joyce Carol Oates’s writing but there was something off with this one. At times the writing felt choppy and it was hard for me to follow the plot.

this was my first Oates and I have to say if this is indicative of her stuff, then she may not be an author for me. this was so much longer than it needed to be and it really became a chore to get through

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the ADR of this.

This was my first JCO book and it took me a while to get into it. To be honest, I thought about DNF the a couple of times. Once I got into it, I was able to get through it a little more quickly but I don’t know if I’d say that I liked it. I think I went into this expecting a totally different story than what it is, and that’s on me.

A whole lot of triggers in this one: child murder (which you know going in), rape, sexual abuse.

This was my first Joyce Carol Oates novel (I have been meaning to read her for years). It is set in the 1970s, mostly in affluent Detroit suburbs. As a Detroit native (who graduated high school in 1970) I related to the locations, although I grew up in more middle-class settings (Detroit and Farmington Hills). The title refers to a real serial killer (also known as the Oakland County Child Killer) who killed four children between the ages of 10 and 14 in 1976 and 1977: the killer has never been identified.

But the serial killer is mostly background. The protagonist is Hannah Jarrett, a wife and mother who lives in a suburb called Far Hills. Her marriage has largely come to be defined by her role as mother, since her relationship with her husband has lost most of its sexual charge. So she is receptive to the advances of a stranger she meets at a fundraiser. Although she thinks of their initial liaison as a one-time thing, she quickly becomes obsessed with this relationship with a man she regards as her lover. It is clear that her self-image is defined by her desirability.

But he finally reveals himself as a blackmailer, using his relationship with Hannah to extort money from her. Hannah tries to play her part but finds that she cannot. Finally, the blackmailer's associate Ponytail steps in to save her from herself. A dream sequence shows her arriving at a home where she has been forgotten: but in the end, she arrives at the hotel room, ready to shoot her lover, which has apparently already been taken care of. While the end is ambiguous, it is certainly clear that Hannah has been spared the need to commit murder to free herself from the consequences of her actions.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I was under the impression this book would focus on a serial killer in Detroit in the late 70s. Instead, it’s more the story of Hannah, a housewife nearing 40, who no longer feels wanted by her husband and starts having an affair with a dangerous stranger. I sympathized with Hannah as she tried to find herself, but she made horrible choices one after the other. She was selfish, often putting everyone around her in danger for the smallest bit of validation. Apparently this author is known for creating horrible characters, but I didn’t know that when I first picked this up.

Hannah’s story was the best of the multiple plot lines going on. There was another character who worked as a thug for hire type and his story was crass and pointless. And then there was the serial killer part which was just part of the background. Graphic scenes of Babysitter killing young boys he was literally given by the Catholic priest seemed gratuitous and random. At close to 500 pages, this book tried to do way too much. It was confusing, dissatisfying, and all over the place. I don’t recommend it unless you’re a big fan of JCO.

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf Doubleday for an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Babysitter was so good! This was my first Joyce Carol Oates book (which is crazy!) but I’ll definitely have to start reading her backlist. I flew through this book because I couldn’t wait to see what would happen. It was brilliant. Highly recommend!

Despite expecting more from this book and its author, I still think it was a decent read. However, it has many trigger warnings like kidnap, murder, rape, infidelity, racism, etc so you have to be careful if you decide to pick it up. I doubt the main character would be a favorite character by readers. Relating to her or accepting her actions is hardly possible.

I enjoy a lot of JCO's books. Unfortunately, this is not for me. Her talent is on display but the style is non-linear and often stream-of-conscious and just not one I enjoy. There is a plot, but it plays a secondary role to text and tone and I think many readers will find it slow going. The subject matter here is brutal: sexual assault, violent racism, etc.