The novel is written by Joyce Carol Oates. The author is a distinguished American author.Oates has produced an amazing variety of excellent work in all genres: novels, short fiction, drama, critical essays, poetry, reviews of contemporary writing and ideas. In her works, Oates focuses on different sides of American society - the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual decline of modern.

She wrote in elliptical prose style, she depicts such cruel and atrocious things as rape, incest, murder, child abuse, and suicide to delineate the forces of evil with which individuals must contend.

She insists that her writing is "experimental," but her individual works are highly accessible. She is known for her violent subject matter and accessible rich style, what is more, her stories frustrate "happy ending». In her works, she is concern about the singular power of the self, and the high cost of the struggle for autonomy. Readers might focus on the patterns of selfhood and the possibilities for relationship in her work. Oates has experimented with almost every major literary school or set of conventions: naturalism, existentialism, social realism, detective stories, epic chronicle, romance.

Oates's first two short story collections, By the North Gate and Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories. 

Both collections explore the decay of modern morality through a series of stories depicting a nonchalant brutality that, according to Oates. The Goddess and Other Women is another of Oates's collections that is unified by themes of sexual tension—specifically, sexual oppression of women.

So Joyce Carol Oates is a very interesting person, she depicts on the one hand a bit brutal events, but on the other hand very important. I think some part of her works will be better for reading when you are fourteen -sixteen and just are getting acquainted with the opportunities and consequences of adulthood.