Word: bloodsmoor
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...lives of the Zinn sisters. The reason for the parody remains between the stock descriptions of lovely laces as Oates gives us glimpses into the bitter reality of women's lives before the turn of the century. But she does it without a moment of didacticism making A Bloodsmoor Romance excel equally in simple entertainment...
RESEMBLING NOTHING so much as Little Women gone wild, A Bloodsmoor Romance leads readers on a merry six hundred page chase after five nineteenth century sisters as they gallivant from their ancestral Bloodsmoor Valley to the Broadway stage, the lawless West the spirit world and back again. Written as a parody of a romance, Joyce Carol Oates latest novel excels in the form it spoofs. True to convention a prim but often hyperbolic narrator tells of shocking year undeniably romantic escapades with an unabashed use of italics and the results are hilarious...
With thirteen other novels to her name, Oates has perfected a lush style whose recurring symbols anything from a bottle of orange-flavored medicine to a full figure corset almost escape our conscious notice. A Bloodsmoor Romance, although packed with laughs and adventure cannot be read quickly and its prodigious length barely serves to tie up all the loose ends. Not many apparently light contemporary novels leave the reader feeling so punch drunk...
...serious core, A Bloodsmoor Romance deals with repression and release. Oates focuses on the restrictions on women's physical natures during the late nineteenth century, epitomized by the corsets which hindered breathing and circulation. In the Bloodsmoor Valley wooing lovers never elude the watchful eyes of chaperones 25 yards away and our narrator lauds Constance Phillippa about to be married because she "was never in that unfortunate state termed nudity" and even bathed lightly attired. Despite the levity inherent in exaggeration the horror comes through in casual accounts of women who have had their lower ribs removed for more fashionable...
...such a world the escapes must be extravagant and complete and Oates allows her heroines outlets that would have eluded their real life counterparts. Time travel exists in Bloodsmoor Valley and a magical are protects each sister's life. Reality loses definition and their prissy but a affectionate narrator adds to this illusion as in her loving remembrances she lets facts slip out of chronological order...