** spoiler alert ** Be warned that just about everything in this review will give something away.

I would have given this four stars, but I just couldn't. I was too aware of Oates manipulating her poor characters, and I just couldn't believe the basic premise. There is a wonderful, close, warm family and the daughter, too-good-to-be-true Christian is brutally raped, but refuses to press charges. This is taking turn the other cheek a bit far, in my opinion. The rest of the book tells how that action--that supposedly "good" action, or nonaction--tore the family apart. The father was so guilt-stricken that he couldn't protect his family, that he eventually banished the girl. And the mother, because she loved her husband first, allowed the banishment. Now, somehow, I just can't follow the psychological logic behind all of this. It seemed more of a literary experiment to prove that it's not always good to be good. I also didn't buy that the father, once a shrewd businessman, would let his obsession with getting legal vengeance tear apart his life. It didn't seem likely to me. If he wasn't an obsessive compulsive before, why would he be one when his daughter was raped? It seemed more like an author manipulating her characters.

I did like several chapters very much. I thought the one chapter, late in the book, written from the now-derelict fathers point of view, was brilliant. And I liked how the family rose from the ashes once the rotten tooth of the father was out of the way. But as I said before, the whole of the book didn't make psychological sense to me. It didn't ring true.