Joyce Carol Oates: Hazards of Time Travel

I was hoping and expecting to be very excited by this. I love and am amazed by the range and volume of her work and the blurb hinted at intriguing modern parallels. But I was rather disappointed. I found the central character most irritating..very sentimentally self-absorbed and with many of the tropes and style of an irritating tween in the throes of first love/passion/lust. Given the situation ( seemingly sent back in time as a punishment for radical and independent thought from a theocratic USA) it seemed to me to be rather a waste of a thrilling and provocative dramatic situation.

Plotting was good though, that set aside and with a most intriguingly twist...or was it? There was a fine degree of ambiguity about the situation...was it all in the mind?

More about the society from which she came would have been good I thought..but to be honest, that society could have seemed predictable and with an element of 'Handmaid's Tale lite'.