Mudwoman

By: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrated by: Susan Ericksen

Length: 19 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

A riveting novel that explores the high price of success in the life of one woman - the first female president of a lauded ivy league institution - and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons, from Joyce Carol Oates, author of the New York Times best seller A Widow’s Story.

Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate - or destiny. After her rescue, the well-meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their middle-class values, seemingly sealing it off forever. But the bulwark of the present proves surprisingly vulnerable to the agents of the past.

Meredith “M.R.” Neukirchen is the first woman president of an Ivy League university. Her commitment to her career and moral fervor for her role are all-consuming. Involved with a secret lover whose feelings for her are teasingly undefined, and concerned with the intensifying crisis of the American political climate as the United States edges toward war with Iraq, M.R. is confronted with challenges to her leadership that test her in ways she could not have anticipated. The fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life in her upstate New York hometown now threaten to undo her.

A reckless trip upstate thrusts M.R. Neukirchen into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind. A powerful exploration of the enduring claims of the past, Mudwoman is at once a psychic ghost story and an intimate portrait of a woman cracking the glass ceiling at enormous personal cost, which explores the tension between childhood and adulthood, the real and the imagined, and the “public” and “private” in the life of a highly complex contemporary woman.

©2012 The Ontario Review, Inc. (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers

A TOTAL waste....

I downloaded this book in "hopes" that it would be a great listen........... (I got it exclusively because of the narrator..) I LOVE Susan Ericksen... BUT this book make absolutly NO SENSE !!! I tried & tried to listen to it, but I HAD to abandon it... :(:(

Long winded and confusing

What disappointed you about Mudwoman?

It was not clear from the beginning what this book was about. It didn't seem like its description.

Has Mudwoman turned you off from other books in this genre?

Can't even tell what the genre is.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

It detracted itself from the way it was written. The narrator can't take the blame for that.

What character would you cut from Mudwoman?

The whole first half.

Any additional comments?

I would only recommend this to someone suffering from insomnia.

this is the worst book ever

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

A total waste of my credit I am shocked that this book even got to print.

Would you ever listen to anything by Joyce Carol Oates again?

No way

I wanted to relate but often could not

The story is intriguing but lingered so long on in many areas and in ways that I could find no significance pertaining to the story or in a way I simply didn't care about that I got lost figuring out what it was "about". Resolving her current life with her childhood trauma? Running away only to be pulled magnetically, back? Facing her past? I could not tell therefore making it hard to mean anything to me.

Performance was good, it's mainly what helped me stay with the story to the end. Love her voice.

Good Story

Where does Mudwoman rank among all the audiobooks you???ve listened to so far?

Very good Book. Wonderful book. good.

What other book might you compare Mudwoman to and why?

Introduction narration. Nice lesson.Very nice.

What does Susan Ericksen bring to the story that you wouldn???t experience if you just read the book?

Excellent book. wonderful book. Excellent.

strange but interesting story. very human .

the reader was excellent. some of the language and dialects were unusual and had to be difficult to read.