Thetime is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York,where five high school girls are joined in a gang dedicated to pride,power, and vengeance on a world they never made - a world that seemsmade to denigrate and destroy them.Foxfire is Joyce CarolOates' strongest and most unsparing novel yet...an often engrossing,often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. Here,then, are the Foxfire chronicles - the secret history of a sisterhood ofblood, a haven from a world of lechers and oppressors, marked by aliberating fury that burns too hot to last.It is the story ofMaddy Monkey, who writes it...of Goldie, whose womanly body masks afierce, explosive temper...of Lana, with her Marilyn Monroe hair andpacks of Chesterfields...of timid Rita, whose humiliation leads to thefirst act of Foxfire revenge. Above all, it is the story of LegsSadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle,hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire, its guiding spirit, itsburning core. At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride ofa novel - charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion.Thestory moves over the years from the first eruption of adolescent angerat sexual abuse to a shared life financed by luring predatory men intotraps baited with sex. But then the gang's very success leads todisaster - as Foxfire makes a last tragic stand against a society intenton swallowing it up. Yet amid scenes of violence, sexual abuse,exploitation, and vengeance lies this novel's greatest power: theexquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the girls ofFoxfire together - especially that between Maddy, the teller ofthe tale,and Legs, whose quintessential strength and bedrock bravery make herone of the most vivid and vital heroines in modern fiction.