# Talk:The Sacrifice (Oates novel)

@MagicatthemovieS: I see you've been going back and forth on whether "African-American Vernacular English" should include a hyphen or not. To me it seems the best option is to use the spelling of the title of the article, which includes the hyphen. What do you think? Rublov (talk) 12:20, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

This review is transcluded from Talk:The Sacrifice (Oates novel)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: GhostRiver (talk · contribs) 21:31, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello! I'll be taking a look at this article for the January 2022 GAN backlog drive. If you haven't already signed up, please feel free to join in! Although QPQ is not required, if you're feeling generous, I also have a list of GA nominations of my own right here.


### Infobox and lede
### Background
#### Joyce Carol Oates
Link Joyce Carol Oates in body
Considered "by some" is a weasel phrase
is about the lives of three working-class characters, and ends with the 1967 Detroit riots. Oates has previously written novels based on real-life events, notably Blonde, about Marilyn Monroe, and Black Water, a roman à clef that parallels the Chappaquiddick incident. All unreferenced


#### Tawana Brawley and other incidents
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray are not mentioned at all in the NYT article linked and can be considered WP:SYNTH
The source similarly does not say that The Stars "parallels" the killing of Floyd, only that it arrived around the same time


#### Setting
While the direct quote checks out, there's some more OR and synthesis, and I find it hard to believe that there are no sources to directly discuss race relations in Jersey in the late '80s


### Plot summary
### Themes
### Reception
### Similarities to the Tawana Brawley case
More OR here, with Like Sybille Frye in the novel, Brawley was discovered in a degraded state with feces smeared on her body and racist slurs written on her body. Like Ednetta, Brawley's mother was seeing a man who had killed his previous wife. She went on to accuse a prosecutor of participating in the crime, and her case was taken up by Al Sharpton (on whom is Marus Mudrick based[9]) and received national attention.


### References
Per MOS:ALLCAPS, the Kirkus Reviews piece should be rendered in title case
All online references need an access date
I do not know what the quotes in [15] are referencing


### General comments
One fair use image and one CC, both relevant
No stability concerns in the revision history
Copyvio score looks okay, one direct quote
I'm stopping the review here, as the analysis comes across more as an undergraduate paper than an encyclopedia entry. Please review our policies on original research and synthesis and look at some of the passages that I have addressed. For the time being, as these issues are pervasive, I am going to fail this article. Please feel free to resubmit when my comments have been suitably addressed. — GhostRiver 17:07, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@GhostRiver: Thank you for the review. You say the analysis comes across more as an undergraduate paper than an encyclopedia entry — could you expand on this? Are you referring to the "Themes" section? If so, I'm not sure I see what is wrong with it. I acknowledge your OR concerns elsewhere in the articles, but everything in "Themes" is cited. You also cite neutrality in your fail rationale, however I'm not sure which of your feedback pertains to neutrality. Rublov (talk) 17:40, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
I am referring to the background portion and my comments there. Mentioning, for instance, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown would be apropos in a critical essay on Oates's novel and the correlations between real-world racialized violence and fiction, but unless Oates herself has made those connections explicit, they are trivial for mention in an encyclopedia article on her novel. As for neutrality, I already mentioned that described "by some" is a weasel phrase. — GhostRiver 17:43, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Okay, but the cited source says JCO is often described as “America’s foremost woman of letters” which seems adequate to support the claim that in the article that she is considered by some to be "America’s foremost woman of letters". Are there any other neutrality concerns? It seems a little harsh to assess it as non-neutral for a single instance of a weasel phrase that is arguably supported by the source. Rublov (talk) 17:54, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Well, looking now more closely at the WaPo interview, at no point does it say that Them is one of her best-regarded novels, or even that it won the 1970 National Book Award for Fiction. The only time that novel is referenced is when Oates herself says that she's unsure whether she'll be most remembered for Them or Blonde. Furthermore, the NYT article that suggests that the 1967 riots "accelerated the decline" of the city only say that white flight was intensified. (I'll also mention that Camden is in South Jersey and thus can't be used as an example for the perceived decline of North Jersey). Furthermore, I do not see neutrality as separate from the other concerns of synthesis, but rather, I see the two as inextricably linked. — GhostRiver 18:06, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for the clarification. I will get to work on these issues. Rublov (talk) 18:12, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

This review is transcluded from Talk:The Sacrifice (Oates novel)/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: Kusma (talk · contribs) 17:00, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
Will review this one. Expect comments within a few days. —Kusma (talk) 17:00, 2 June 2022 (UTC)


### Progress and general comments
Images look good; any reason not to include one of Oates? (In particular, an image would tell readers that she is white).
All relevant areas are covered, so "broadness" gets a tick, although there are some things that could be examined in more detail, see below.
No edit warring, mostly written by you.
Nicely formatted references.
Focus is OK, although the plot summary is a bit long compared to the rest of the article (best to amend this by expanding the rest).
No original research visible (other than in the selection of reviews, but that is probably ok), decent sources.
Prose and MOS comments below.
Nothing fishy jumps out to point towards copyvio.
First pass done @Rublov, I'll leave you with my comments for a moment. Nice work! —Kusma (talk) 16:17, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

@Kusma: Thank you for the review, and especially for digging up more sources, which I have incorporated into the article. I believe that I have addressed most of your concerns. I made the lead a little longer; I'm not sure if there's much more I can add without going into too much detail. I don't know what to do about the grammatical tense in the "Joyce Carol Oates" section. As far as I can see, the tense in each sentence is grammatically correct even if it changes a lot. Ruбlov (talk • contribs) 15:10, 5 June 2022 (UTC)


### Content and prose review
Lead: a bit short, might benefit from a slight extension of the plot summary and perhaps a paragraph break afterwards.
Plot: "feces has been" -> "feces have been": "feces" is plural.
"oddly": from whose perspective is this odd?
after Anis beat her brutally is "her"=Sybilla?
Joyce Carol Oates: tense is a bit all over the place in this section.
Setting (and probably elsewhere): emdashes should be unspaced, see MOS:EMDASH.
Themes: battle of wills between the Mudrick twins the plot section does not mention that they are twins or that there is a battle of wills between them. There's also probably more about skin colour to be extracted from the Guardian review.
Reception: There's probably more to say about these reviews, and there are more reviews to talk about, for example one in the Independent: [1].
For example, the soundbites from the other reviews used here seem more convincing to me.
Another critical review: [2]
Another positive review: [3].
I'd like to see some comment on her being a white author writing about black themes. For example, this article has the statement Beginning in the 1990s, she began dealing with race relations in her fiction, in a way that other, more timorous (white) writers might treat only tangentially or not at all. Her masterly novels Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1992), I'll Take You There (2002), Black Girl / White Girl (2006), and The Sacrifice (2016) "dared" to evoke black experience, especially black-white relationships, with a conceptual boldness and convincing detail virtually unprecedented in the (white) American literary canon. that puts this into the context of her other work.
Enough for now, will check back in a couple of hours. —Kusma (talk) 14:21, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

@Rublov: Much improved! I'm not too fussed about the tense in the author section if you like to keep as is. I would change more directly than most white authors to more directly than most other white authors and would suggest to remove the lone citation from the lead (if you cite just one thing, why this one?).
I assume we know nothing about sales? (Just asking, couldn't find this info for my own most recent novel GA either). —Kusma (talk) 19:31, 5 June 2022 (UTC)
I haven't been able to discover anything about sales, but from everything else I know about the novel I doubt it sold particularly well. I believe the citation in the lead is required per MOS:CITELEAD because it is a direct quotation; this seems to be the trend for recent FAs, e.g. Assassination of Talaat Pasha and Daisy (advertisement). Ruбlov (talk • contribs) 23:07, 5 June 2022 (UTC)
OK fine. Not sure I agree with this, but I often don't agree with the MOS :) Happy with everything else, and I have now managed to also access the NY Times sources so I have seen most of the reviews now and your use of them is fine. Will promote in a moment. Good work! —Kusma (talk) 11:13, 6 June 2022 (UTC)