THE SACRIFICE focuses on a teenager in Red Rock, the black neighborhood of a fictional town in New Jersey. Fifteen-year-old Sybilla Frye, the alleged victim of a horrifying racial crime, has been found bound and severely battered in the basement of an old factory. Though refusing to cooperate with the police and zealously protected by her untrusting mother, she is still able to make it clear that white cops perpetrated the crime. And so the reader is pulled by author Joyce Carol Oates into the pit of confusion and hostility surrounding the neighborhood and everyone in it --- even its most vulnerable inhabitants.

"THE SACRIFICE brings into disturbing clarity the human frustrations of the post-civil rights movement era, a time when so much of the earlier racial tension that supposedly had been resolved was still roiling away just under the surface."

Oates circles the truth, allowing everyone a chance to speak: Sybilla’s mother Ednetta, fretting at her daughter’s suffering and fearful of what it will mean for her life but loving her husband to the point of blindness; a female Hispanic police officer, hated by her colleagues and desperate to make Ednetta see that she is on her side; media and social workers, all eager to get a piece of the pie; Ednetta’s common-law husband Anis, a brutal man who aches with a desire to play his part in the town’s history of race relations; and a lawyer and his sleazy reverend brother, who sees Sybilla as a chance to get the attention he deserves, even if he has to adjust the facts to suit his needs. Some of these actors are sympathetic to Sybilla, at least in theory, while others are downright out for blood, sick to death of having to pretend to play nice with people they see as The Enemy.

As the book descends deeper into this toxic environment, characters’ motivations become murkier. Some actions are nearly incomprehensible, while others can only be accounted for by acknowledging a seemingly irreparable degradation of trust between the public and those who serve it. And then there are those irrational decisions made for human reasons like pride, love, fear and self-hatred, which dominate the novel and often real life.

In the end, it almost doesn’t matter exactly what happened or why: the residents of Red Rock are so far underwater that “fact” is only a way of looking at things. And Oates’ representation of the effects of such a scandal on our modern media-frenzied national imagination is all the more grotesque because it is believable.

THE SACRIFICE brings into disturbing clarity the human frustrations of the post-civil rights movement era, a time when so much of the earlier racial tension that supposedly had been resolved was still roiling away just under the surface. The obvious question the book brings to mind is whether we continue to live in this world, convinced that we have done the hard work and solved our most pressing problems, despite obvious evidence to the contrary.