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Book Summary and Reviews of Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates

Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates

Missing Mom

by Joyce Carol Oates

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  • Published:
  • Oct 2005, 448 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Oates returns to upstate New York's Mount Ephraim, the setting of We Were the Mulvaneys. This time, she focuses on the middle class - Nikki Eaton is a 31 year old reporter for the smalltown Beacon and the black sheep of the family. She's having an affair with a married DJ; she barely tolerates her widowed mother Gwen, and her homemaker sister, Clare. Two days after the story opens Gwen is murdered by an ex-con. Missing Mom follows Nikki during the year following her mother's death.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

'...yet the novel is so conventional and relentlessly detailed that it can't help showing its characters behaving in ways that resonate.' - PW
'...a profoundly involving and haunting explication of grief, followed, finally, by a renewed embrace of life.' - Booklist.

This information about Missing Mom was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Joyce Carol Oates Author Biography

Photo by Dustin Cohen

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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