Helpful Score: 1
I started off with gleeful disdain for these pitiful people whose lives circled around gossip and myth. By the middle of the book, I, too, was digging for any scrap of information. By then end, I was a character in the book. Wonderful stuff!
Great writing from Joyce Carol Oates - a whole town focuses on a teenage boy accused of killing a man. They think and talk of him, not with disgust or revulsion, but with something akin to adoration. Everyone either claims to know him well or wishes fervently that they could know him and be a part of his life. And how does the object of all this worship and longing react? That's the interesting part!
