Finally

rd a Joyce Carol Oates novel-- something i've been meaning to do for such a long time! However, instead of starting with heavy hitters like Black Water or Blonde. What have started me off on my J.C. Oates journey is a, (not good to assume, but i'll do it anyway) i assume, little known Young Adult-- the classification i found it under @ the NYPL-- novel called Sexy.

As my nieces continue to get older at, practically, the speed of light (though close to, and at tween stage now), i've become more & more interested in finding out exactly what kind of hell my sisters will be in for when the teenage yrs hit. This is a new era we're living in. I figure, though things will always be different for each generation, these are interesting times, c'est vrai?

Though Sexy is damn good literature that Oates is writing for the young crowd-- the exploration of the developing male adolescent sexuality (something i'm not too familiar w/ coming fr a family made up of mostly women). The cover drew me in-- a hunched over vulnerable-looking pic of the rawboned protagonist, under such an explosive title!-- but the blurb on the inside jacket was just so misleading. (Misleading blurbs are a problem i come across every so often, so i try to take them in stride. But it gets a bit annoying). I don't know, maybe other people would feel that the story did fulfill its catastrophic account of broken trust. For me it didn't. The novel is so much subtler than that. And i felt that it wasn't so much the adults in his life that the sixteen-year-old Darren Flynn lost trust in-- it's more internal & psychological (not to mention hormonal!) than that.