Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.

Carol Oates fills over 800 pages by detaily repeating scenes already described when one of the protagonists remembers them or tells someone about them on the phone. Does she think her readers have such short memories? The five children of the family are incredibly different in looks and characters, they seem so constructed that they must be adopted. It is hard to keep turning so many pages filled with people the author herself seems to have disliked. They are so full of self-pitying and hatred. It is not credible that grown-up children with lives of their own should be so shaken by the death of their not so healthy father in his mid-sixties that 3 of 5 of them contemplate suicide. Mrs Oates does not seem to know that there were alternatives for females in 2010 from being career-oriented virginal spinsters or housewives who totally depend on their unfaithful husbands for these are the only types that appear in this book.