Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

Rating:
Summary: Oops
Review: Alomost all the reviews for this book were positive, except for mine. I did not like how long, and boring this book was. The only thing that kept it going was possibility of one of the characters having a love affair with another girl. I say, rent the movie, its more interesting (but does not follow the book, obviously.)

Rating:
Summary: Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
Review: First of all, I absolutely loved the book. It was one that once I picked it up it was hard to quit reading. There is constantly some type of action, and never a dull moment. It was interesting to see how the dynamic of the relationships changed among the characters and how Legs maintained physical unity among the girls as they started to lack a spiritual unification.

Joyce Carol Oates is very descriptive and does a good job at character development. She sets it up so you end up developing some type of attachment to her characters. The book at times gets a bit extreme, but it still makes for refreshing entertainment. It demonstrates a form of recklessness that brings out benefits as well as new problems.

The story basically focuses on the growth of what starts to be a small group of girls into a full out gang. The girls' hatred for men builds and they progressively get more dangerous. Soon, Foxfire becomes a force to be reckoned with in their New York town. It's a really good book for those who are entertained by stories that deal with a type of progressive self-destruction.

I'd like to add that I saw the movie first. After reading the book, I must say that the movie doesn't even compare. The book puts the movie to shame. The book is far more eventful, and a lot of events that made the story stick out were left out of the movie. Where the movie did touch on the empowerment of women, it failed to capture the issues brought up in the book like pregnancy, racism, economical prejudice, drug abuse, and inter-family struggle. If you haven't seen the movie yet, I would watch it first. Otherwise you will be let down big time.

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Summary: FOXFIRE IN MY HEART.
Review: I fell in love with the writing of Joyce Carol Oates last year, when I read Blonde. It's the best book I've ever read. Or is it? After reading FOXFIRE, I'm not sure. I've read 7 books of Oates, FOXFIRE is together with Blonde and Because it is bitter and because it is my heart, one of the best.

FOXFIRE affected me. I could find sentences that really spoke to me, the story itself spoke to me as well. I found paragraphs that I really wanted to quote, BECAUSE THIS IS HOW IT REALLY IS!

It's a wonderful story that is beautiful written, and it will stay with you. I wonder what happened to them, these characters are real to me. Maddy-Monkey with her beautiful Underwood and Legs Sadovsky, running, almost flying!, over the roof tops. Like the hero she is, like the hero we remember. FOXFIRE IS MY HEART.

Rating:
Summary: not so good
Review: I had to read this book as a research project for an english project (im in 11th grade). I was very disturbed and sort of shaken up by how descriptive everything was. It was kind of unnerving to hear about these girls lives, and how terrible they are all the while knowing that they are basically the same age as me. I brought this to my teachers attention and she read the book and agreed that I should stop reading it, but that I didnt have time to read another book. I wrote my paper on this book, even though it disturbed me so much. My thesis? Violence, Rape, Molestation, and powerlessness and how they affect the lives of young women today, reading about it through the eyes of young fictional characters. Needless to say, I got an A.

Rating:
Summary: Words cannot describe the feeling this book gives you.
Review: I read Foxfire because I saw a clip of the movie in a Craft preview, and I thought it looked really good. So I went out to rent the movie, but I couldn't find it! So I jumped on the internet, and found out that the movie was based on a book. Well, I dashed out and bought it. I read the whole thing in 3 days, which is good for me, because with school and other activities, I hardly ever find time to read. When you read the book, you really get to know the characters. I felt as if I was right there with them. I felt like I was Legs Sadovsky's heart, not Maddy-Monkey. I felt that I was taking part in their revenges. The worst thing about this book is that it ends! It was so depressing when I finished that last page. I wanted more! I wanted it to go on forever! Let me stop all my rambling and sum up what I am trying to say: This is one of the best books I have ever read, if not THE best. Please, do yourself a favor and go out and read it!

Rating:
Summary: A Bad-Tasting Book
Review: I think every young woman should read Foxfire. It's a literary fantasy for any girl who's been raised in poverty, sexually abused, or made to feel like a lesser person, an idiot, or an object, just because they were female. Foxfire doesn't try to deliver a positive "Girls Can Do It!" message, and it probably won't leave you with a smile on your face when you have finished reading. This book is more likely to leave you with a bad taste in your mouth. Some scenes are troubling, some are sad, and others are downright frightenening. For example, Legs meets a crippled, handicapped woman named "Yetta" whose brother keeps her tied up in the backyard like a dog, and allows drunken men to rape her. Legs is a fiery character (after all, Angelina Jolie won the part in the film version of Foxfire), and her reaction to Yetta's agony is just as frightening. Some images from this book are hard to forget. But Joyce Carol Oates is a realist, and as devastating as reality is, it certainly makes you think. Of course, Foxfire isn't perfect. Although their exploits are exciting, many characters are two-dimensional stereotypes, including the heroine, Margaret "Legs" Sadovsky. Other characters aren't fully developed, or are hastily introduced near the end, giving you little time to warm to them or even remember their names. I thought the author's use of language and grammar was perplexing. Unless you have no concept of the English lnaguage to begin with, it's likely you'll find some parts of the book (or all of it) hard to understand, as Joyce Carol Oates plays fast and loose with grammar and punctuation. All in all, Foxfire is a though-provoking novel. "FOXFIRE BURNS & BURNS," and continues to do so long after you've finished reading.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and truly real from start to finish, you feel it al
Review: Joyce Carol Oates finds a way to bring you back to this time, to this place and become on of these girls going through their pains and sufferings and ups and downs. These characters are all real they are either you or your daughter or your friend and you understand the times and the hardships and why they feel they need to act the way they do because she makes you one of them. `It burns and burns and never looks back'. That is something this book truly does.

Rating:
Summary: Overrated -- needed some serious editing
Review: This book is fun to read. The story is fast paced and I have never been so addicted to any character as I was to Legs. Her charismatic personality and true caring nature [even if that care made her friends go a little over the edge] forced me to never want to stop reading about her. The characters were spectacular and their endeavors were exciting and terrifying at the same time. I would just like to know why Legs gave up on Maddy so fast and vice versa. I need to go back and read it again.

Rating:
Summary: loved it
Review: When I read Foxfire four years ago, I became a Joyce Carol Oates fanatic. That didn't change when I read it again just recently. Its appeal is the girl gang idea- about the power struggles that each of the five girls as they move through adolescence. Legs Sadowsky is a troubled young girl who brings four others together in ways they never thought possible. Oates has a marvelous way with words, in which you are horrified yet at the same time fascinated by all that happens. Legs makes for a marvelous, beautiful character in that way. The girls are brutal to one another, and harsh to an outside world, which has, in a way, rejected them. In the end, the girls have to make decisions about growing up that affect each other and, inevitably, the outside world. Its a sexy, sad, and thought-provoking book that I couldn't put down.

Rating:
Summary: passionate account of a girl gang
Review: Written in a passionate rush of often purply prose, "Foxfire" is the story of a girl gang which performed feminist acts before feminism was as taken for granted as it is now. Led by the charismatic and enigmatic Legs Savodsky, the group moves from vandalism and physical acts of aggression to kidnapping, this comes at the very end and is, as you might suspect, the end of the gang as well. Chronicled by the author's stand-in Maddy Wirtz, a former "good girl" who is going against (she tells us) the long ago warning not to tell anyone about Foxfire's affairs. But, as she says, who is around to stop her. Great book - and also 1996 movie worth searching out.