LITTLE BIRD OF HEAVEN

Pity the narrator who draws Oates's unrelievedly grim novel about the consequences of a murder on the daughter of the suspected killer and the son of his victim. The book is spare in dialogue, providing little opportunity for the reader to change tone from the bleakness that enwraps the book's two central characters in the wake of the brutal killing. Oates is not trying to torture us but to examine a complicated intersection between love and violence. Kate Reading locks into the emotional tenor of Oates's novel, and her quiet intensity, free of unnecessary dramatics, is both hypnotic and focusing. The damaged souls Oates creates are fully realized—and fully heartbreaking—in Reading's perceptive reading. M.O. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2009]