Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates

This month, I did a buddy read with another avid book reader. Together we read and discussed the novel, Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates. I've been wanting to read Daddy Love for two or three years now. I am glad to have finally read this novel and crossed it off of my 'to be read' pile this month.

Daddy Love is one of Joyce Carol Oates's shorter novels at 240 pages. It's a quick read, but also a difficult novel to read due to the subject matter. Let's just say that Daddy Love is perhaps the darkest novel I've read by Joyce Carol Oates to date and it is not for the faint of heart. If child abduction and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of very young minors is a trigger for you... Then stay far, far away from Daddy Love as this novel touches upon these topics and it isn't pretty! As far as the writing goes, I felt like Daddy Love is really well written overall. This is Joyce Carol Oates after all!

Daddy Love is divided into three parts. I am impressed with how well Joyce Carol Oates writes her prose and can take the reader deep inside dark and disturbing topics with ease. How does she do this so well? JCO also has a knack for writing about men with certain dark and disturbing predilections very well. Chet Cash (aka Daddy Love) is a true monster and JCO writes him in such a chilling, yet believable manner.

The ending for Daddy Love is ambiguous! I am not a fan of ambiguous endings. I like solid endings to novels where things are wrapped up nicely... But perhaps this is difficult to achieve with this sort of novel. I'm not sure if it could have ended any other way than "ambiguous".

JCO really does a great job deep diving into the mother's (Dinah) grief over the kidnapping of Robbie and for the father's (Whit) grief as well. She does a good job with how the kidnapping impacted their marriage, and so on... And, of course, we read about how Robbie/Gideon is treated during his time with Chet/Daddy Love and it is horrific.

By the way, I listened to the unabridged audio version of Daddy Love, which was well narrated by Christine Williams.

Below is the publisher's summary for Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates, which I discovered on Goodreads:

Dinah Whitcomb seemingly has everything—a loving and successful husband, and a smart, precocious young son named Robbie—until one day, their worlds are shattered when Dinah is attacked and Robbie is abducted from a mall parking lot. As Dinah recovers from her wounds, she struggles to come to terms with her new reality and to keep her marriage afloat. Though it seems hopeless, she retains a flicker of hope that her son is still alive.

The kidnapper, a part-time preacher named Chester Cash, calls himself Daddy Love: he has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys, indoctrinating them into becoming both his lover and his “son.” He renames Robbie “Gideon,” slowly brainwashing him into believing that he is Daddy Love’s real son. Any time the boy resists or rebels, he faces punishment beyond his wildest nightmares.

As Robbie grows older, he begins to realize that the longer he stays in the home of this demon, the greater the chance that he’ll end up like Daddy Love’s other “sons” who were never heard from again. Somewhere within this tortured young boy lies a spark of rebellion, and soon he sees just what lengths he must go to in order to have any chance at survival.

I am giving Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates a rating of 4 stars out of 5 stars.

Until my next post, happy reading!