Talk:The Sacrifice (Oates novel)/GA2

GA Review

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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

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV () 3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant () Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

• 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)