Valentine

All her life Corrine has watched [wrath] move through her students and their parents, through men sitting at the bar or in the bleachers, through churchgoers and neighbors and the town's fathers and mothers. She has watched her own kith and kin pour this poison into their best glassware, spoon it into the plates their ancestors hauled in wagons from Georgia and Alabama, all while proclaiming they worked for everything they ever got and nobody ever gave them nothing, they earned it, living and dying in that refinery, in those fields, and they can't do a goddamn thing about the people who control the purse strings and hand over their paychecks, who can put them out of work with a wink and a nod, but they sure can point a finger at somebody else. If they say it for long enough, and in different ways, they might stop seeing the child of God standing on the other side of those words, or buckling under the awful weight of them. . . And while Mary Rose maybe has a better reason than most of these fools and sinners to open the door for unbridled wrath, Corrine also knows this: one way or another it will eventually kill you. But goddamn, you can do some damage on your way out the door.

What a beautiful debut that uses one of my favorite techniques: individual vignettes that dovetail into intersecting storylines. Many thanks to my friend for giving me this ARC over a year ago.

Also: the whole time reading this, I couldn't help thinking of the (excellent) Old ‘97s' song of the same name: “Of all the many things that you were counting on/well there ain't none better than a girl who's moving on.”

To Say Goodbye. This was an interesting story that starts out in the aftermath of a brutal rape... and never really gets any lighter. A dark look at West Texas in the oil boom of the late 70s, this is one of those tales where you're looking from several different perspectives - each chapter is labeled not by number, but from the view it is focusing on - to get a view into a large swath of the bigger picture through individuals' thoughts. The ending gets a bit wonky, with one perspective in particular thrown in for seemingly no real reason (though it does give a bit of a coda to one particular plot point, but spends far too much time doing things other than this), but the final few lines are an appropriate ending, and honestly better than some of the foreboding foreshadowing that preceded it. Very much recommended.

Valentine is the debut novel from acclaimed author Elizabeth Wetmore. An instant New York Times Bestseller and a Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club pick, it's a stunning novel of literary fiction that depicts the lives of several women in Odessa, Texas during the 1970s as they wrestle with the aftermath of the rape of Gloria Ramirez early in the morning on Valentine's Day, 1976. Told through the different women's points of view, Wetmore puts on a master class in storytelling.

The novel opens with Gloria Ramirez escaping her assailant, Dale Strickland, who brutally attacked her the night before, as she trudges barefoot three miles through cow pastures to Mary Rose's front porch, a pregnant mother at home with her young daughter. Gloria begs Mary Rose for water and shelter. Strickland eventually shows up for Gloria, but Mary Rose keeps him at bay by pointing her rifle at him until the cops show up. A tense opening to a novel that unspools the lives of these two women and the others that orbit this event: Corrine, young Debra Ann, Ginny, Suzanne, Karla. All of their lives are revealed and the indignities they face from the men in Odessa, as well as judgment and shame they face from the community as a whole when they don't act the way they should: prim, proper, quiet, subservient. When Strickland gets off with only probation and a fine, this injustice sends Mary Rose off the deep end, her rage not easy to quell.

Although this is a debut, Wetmore has published short stories for a while in notable literary journals. Her confidence shines through the various narrative points of view, particularly with the first-person Mary Rose, third-person Corrine, and first-person plural (!!!) Karla chapters. Wetmore has beautifully executed metaphors and similes and her characters are fully-formed and four-dimensional, the entirety of their humanity on display: their despair, their love, their rage, and their dissatisfaction with life in Odessa. Although the story opens with a couple of intense chapters that would inform most readers that a crime thriller will be told, Wetmore downshifts into the lives of all these women who orbit around the horrific event that Gloria Ramirez endured. Then once Dale Strickland's trial commences two-thirds of the way through the novel, the intensity picks back up, only to extinguish any sense of hope or justice for Glory (Gloria changes her name after the rape) as well as the other women invested in her well-being. It's a brutally sad turn of events.

But where the novel shines most brightly are with its characters. I became fully invested in these women. I felt I knew these women. I have met and known many like them here in Texas. Many of their observations about the others in Odessa are brutally honest, searing, and sometimes hilarious. And that is a marvelous thing for readers.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this novel 5 stars.

I thought this would read more like a thriller, but it reads more like connected short stories. That was fine, but like any short story collection, some of the chapters are stronger than others. Karla, for example, was amazing and could stand alone. Overall, I thought this was excellent but I found myself getting impatient to get back to Mary Rose or Glory in order to get back to the main story.