The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls join a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world they never made—a world that seems designed to denigrate and destroy them.

Foxfire is Joyce Carol Oates' strongest and most unsparing novel, an engrossing and often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. Here are the Foxfire chronicles—the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of lechers and oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last.

This is the story of Maddy Monkey, who writes it; of Goldie, whose womanly body masks a fierce, explosive temper; of Lana, with her Marilyn Monroe hair and packs of Chesterfields; of timid Rita, whose humiliation leads to the first act of Foxfire revenge. Above all, it is the story of Legs Sadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle, hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire, its guiding spirit, its burning core.

At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride of a novel—charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion. Amid scenes of violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and vengeance lies this novel’s greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the girls of Foxfire together.