Abstract
A prolific, highly visible, and award-winning author, Joyce Carol Oates is best known for writing novels and stories for an adult audience, and most critical attention paid to her fiction has focused on her books for adults. Critics have given little notice to her children’s books and young adult fiction, including her engaging and timely 2003 young adult novel Freaky Green Eyes, despite the fact that in many of her young adult novels, she revisits several of the same themes she has explored elsewhere. For instance, in Freaky Green Eyes, Oates addresses a concern that readers of her novels have seen her write about previously: domestic violence. This novel is not, of course, her first foray into young adult fiction (her well-known Big Mouth and Ugly Girl, published in 2002, was her first young adult novel), nor is it the only one featuring an adolescent as a first-person narrator (as in her 1968 novel Expensive People). In Freaky Green Eyes, however, readers are presented with vivid descriptions of domestic violence and details of multiple gruesome murders from the perspective of an adolescent narrator who is both a victim of and witness to the terrible abuse perpetrated by her father.