Item: Valentine
Rating: 5.00
Author: bookanonjeff

by Elizabeth Wetmore

A top ten New York Times bestseller. With the haunting emotional power of American Dirt and the atmospheric suspense of Where the Crawdads Sing: a compulsive debut novel that explores the aftershock of a brutal crime on the women of a small Texas oil town.

'The very definition of a stunning debut' Ann Patchett

'Amazing ... like a grimmer, newer version of To Kill A Mockingbird ... It sounds bleak, and it is, but there is beauty, too; in the landscape, in the spirit of some of the people and most of all in Wetmore's wonderful writing' Wendy Holden, Daily Mail

Mercy is hard in a place like this. I wished him dead before I ever saw his face...

In a place like Odessa, Texas choosing who to trust can be a dangerous game.

Mary Rose Whitehead isn't looking for trouble - but when it shows up at her front door, she finds she can't turn away.

Corinne Shepherd, newly widowed, wants nothing more than to mind her own business, and for everyone else to mind theirs. But when the town she has spent years rebelling against closes ranks she realises she is going to have to take a side.

Gloria Ramirez, fourteen years old and out of her depth, survives the brutality of one man only to face the indifference and prejudices of many.

When justice is as slippery as oil, and kindness becomes a hazardous act, sometimes courage is all we have to keep us alive.

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

by Elizabeth Wetmore

Reviewed by Jeff Sexton on Apr 8, 2020

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