Valentine
2020 • 11 pages
Ratings13
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings13
Average rating3.8
An instant New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! "A thrilling debut that deserves your attention." –Ron Charles, the Washington Post Written with the haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout and Barbara Kingsolver, an astonishing debut novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the VCU Cabell First Novel Award. Mercy is hard in a place like this . . . It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field—an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences. Valentine is a haunting exploration of the intersections of violence and race, class and region in a story that plumbs the depths of darkness and fear, yet offers a window into beauty and hope. Told through the alternating points of view of indelible characters who burrow deep in the reader’s heart, this fierce, unflinching, and surprisingly tender novel illuminates women’s strength and vulnerability, and reminds us that it is the stories we tell ourselves that keep us alive.
Reviews with the most likes.
4.5 stars. Beautiful writing and character development, though the ending left me a little lukewarm.
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.
