The Rise of Life on Earth Book

A child survives a brutal attack by her father, the same attack that her little sister died in, an attack precipitated by her mother abandoning the family. The Rise of Life on Earth is a cold, detached and often brutal story of that child's life from recovery in a public hospital through foster care and her early twenties as a nurses aide, a series of events and encounters that shape the person she will be. The matter of fact nature of the description by Oates, a recounting of the correct method for sanitising hands on a hospital ward given the same treatment as the early assault for example, serves to heighten the impact, shocking the reader early on and then leaving you wondering what horror can possibly be in store next, but also helps elicit your sympathy for a protagonist who is actually quite the undesirable, to put it mildly. A pretty stunning early work, not even remotely what I expected from my first encounter with an author I'd heard mentioned and praised for years. I'm not sure I'm in any rush to find out how typical this is of her oeuvre though.