bwluvs2read 's review for:

A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates

4.0

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From the second I began this novel, I had to know how it would end. Oates navigates rhetoric that defines the protestant American experience for many men and women. Tackling subjects such as abortion, suicide, terrorism, the death penalty, white pride, rape, murder, and extremism, Oates has crafted a story that will make the reader question their own assumptions about Biblical principals in current American society. In this novel, the martyr is not Christ, but Dr. Voorhees, a man devoted to woman's choice but also his own self-aggrandizing work. Assassinated by the passionate Luther Dunphy, Voorhees and his legacy collapse in front of a small women's center in a rural Ohio town. What follows is a deep entanglement that examines the story from multiple perspectives. Readers will hear from the wives of both men, prison guards, judges, nurses who worked with Voorhees, and, most importantly, the daughters of murderer and murdered. Unquestionably, this novel is the archive that Naomi Voorhees sought to create after her father's death. The book's closing creates a seamless joining of both perspectives, showing that perhaps a sort of American dream is still possible - but that it is not purely agnostic or godly or Right to Life or Pro Choice - a mixture of all these things: all these people.