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A review by ruthiella
A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates
4.0
A Bloodsmoor Romance is a “romance” in the literary sense. There is very little in the way of a romantic love story between characters. Instead is more about the often bizarre and mysterious adventures of the five Zinn daughters in Gilded Age America. It was a pastiche of typical mid-19th century fiction maybe in its telling. The narrator often uses stilted language and/or syntax and it is very long; over 600 pages. It felt a lot like a subversion of Little Women. Though outside of some Hawthorn and Twain, Little Women is pretty much the only American classic I’ve read from that time period. But I interpreted it as an intentional send up of modern historical novels that idealize and whitewash the past.
The story begins when the youngest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Zinn, teenaged Deirdre, is abducted by a man in a black hot-air balloon in 1879. This bizarre event is the beginning of the end of the Zinn family. The narrator takes the reader back to inventor John Zinn’s rather cloudy beginnings and his curious courtship with the then Miss Prudence Kiddemaster, heiress and bluestocking, from a wealthy and well connected Pennsylvania family. Then the fates of Dierdre and her other sisters are recounted. It is a wild tale and it includes mediums, time machines, stardom on the stage, cross-dressing and secret histories…pretty wild all in all. I am looking forward to trying JCO’s gothic novel Bellefleur, next. Is there nothing she cannot write?
The story begins when the youngest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Zinn, teenaged Deirdre, is abducted by a man in a black hot-air balloon in 1879. This bizarre event is the beginning of the end of the Zinn family. The narrator takes the reader back to inventor John Zinn’s rather cloudy beginnings and his curious courtship with the then Miss Prudence Kiddemaster, heiress and bluestocking, from a wealthy and well connected Pennsylvania family. Then the fates of Dierdre and her other sisters are recounted. It is a wild tale and it includes mediums, time machines, stardom on the stage, cross-dressing and secret histories…pretty wild all in all. I am looking forward to trying JCO’s gothic novel Bellefleur, next. Is there nothing she cannot write?