' Thought I was going to enjoy this A LOT more. ' could make a great movie (or a class B-weepie?) ' - Daniela, Ariah's relationship with her kids is sometimes disturbing.

' It was pretty good yet at times monotonous. The history around and setting of Niagara Falls made it worth finishing. Ariah seemed like three completely different people in three vaguely related books, and none of her characterizations were very likeable. ' I wanted to like this book much more than I did. Overall Performance: Narration Rating: Story Rating:.“Geography, history, and human psychology are refracted through the author’s fevered, romantic, and sublime imagination…The ironies are rich, delicious, and disturbing.” “Engaging…the Gothic meets Erin Brockovich.”

Oates, a writer who has conceived some of the most intriguing, disturbing female characters of the past half century, has forged in Ariah a creature of steel-nicked, twisted, but somehow lovely.” Credit the fascinating woman at its core. “With prose as light and eerie as the flutter of piano keys, Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel is a dazzlingly ambitious tale…Bumpy, dense, topical, and deeply affecting, The Falls is that rare family saga with both a kind heart and an ugly gut. “Hypnotic…Oates juxtaposes a majestic and dangerous natural phenomenon-the Falls at Niagara-with a man-made monstrosity, the deadly witches’ brew of nuclear and toxic waste known as Love Canal-as the threatening elements underlying a family saga of self-destruction and redemption.” In true Oates fashion, the characters are all thoroughly annoying, but you keep reading about them.' 'Grand, sweeping saga set in the Niagara Falls, mostly during the first phase of the Love Canal litigation. The Falls is a love story gone wrong and righted and it alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the great American novelists. Set against the mythic historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century. What unfurls is a drama of parents and their children of secrets and sins of lawsuits, murder and eventually redemption. What follows is their passionate love affair, marriage, and children - a seemingly perfect existence.īut the tragedy by which their life together began shadows them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder.

At her side throughout, confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby is unexpectedly transfixed by the strange, otherworldly gaze of this plain, strange woman, falling in love with her though they barely exchange a word. 'The Widow Bride of The Falls,' as Ariah comes to be known, begins a relentless, seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. A newlywed, he has left behind his wife, Ariah Erskine, in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls.

The falls by joyce carol oates