Reviews for Raven's Wing

The average rating for Raven's Wing based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-26 00:00:00 Craig Woods I think Oates is at her best with short fiction; in full-length novels, she is--sometimes--a bit heavy-handed and rambling. (All those exclamation marks! And those carefully constructed asides. Interesting--excellent, even--in small doses, but tedious after a while.) In part, my preference for her short fiction is also due to her subject matter, which almost uniformly centers on the darker aspects of the modern American experience: violence, rape, exploitation, alienation, substance abuse, etc. Despite these qualifications, I have always appreciated Oates' position in the modern literary canon, and I think the short stories of Raven's Wing are typical of her better work. Some are explorations of the subtler aspects of disappointment: the title story "Raven's Wing," "The Seasons" (one of my favorites), "Harrow Street at Linden," "Ancient Airs, Voices" (another especially memorable story) and "The Jesuit"--the latter about dealing with a coworker (in this case, one with religious authority no less) who seems to hate you for no reason at all. The need for approval in the face of someone's unexplained dislike for you is probably one of those universal experiences, and Oates handles it with flair. Other stories are much darker and more disturbing: "Baby," "Testimony" and another of my favorites, "Little Wife," a tale of a runaway abused by a group of men, apparently with her consent (as she has every opportunity to leave or call the police, and does not). This one is firmly in typical Oatesian territory (reminiscent of her novel Man Crazy, which I found repulsive) , but tempered by the effect of being described by her eleven-year-old narrator. On the whole, I really appreciated these stories. I still find Oates an over-prolific and often problematic writer (due to the combination of over-heated prose and squicky subject matter), but when she is at her best, she is really quite good. Definitely recommended for fans of literary fiction.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-17 00:00:00 Jaime Urrea Even given the book was published in 1986, I felt like these characters were not real, though meant to be, living in a two-dimensional world. I didn't believe in them. The whole experience for me was flat.