valentine a novel review

Besides Glory, there’s Mary Rose, young mother of Aimee Jo, who discovered the bruised and bloodied rape victim on her front porch, a quirk of fate that pegged her as a prime witness for the prosecution.

— a precocious kid and voracious reader with a sophisticated moral compass, neglected and underestimated by the grown-ups around her. It’s a difficult story, as tragic as it is inevitable. *I received a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.*. Another slick if divinable suspenser from Savage (Precipice, 1994), Greenwich Village-set, in which a psychopath with a grudge stalks a young mystery writer. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.

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Valentine: A Novel by Elizabeth Wetmore – 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.

Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Everybody, she notes, “is talking about the girl who was kidnapped and attacked.
Mercy is hard in a place like this . There is extravagance here. Next, there’s Corinne Shephard, a tough old ex-schoolteacher whose beloved husband, Potter, has just taken his own life in the face of his terminal diagnosis with a rare form of cancer. .

It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. If only they can survive to get there.

I discovered Valentine when a friend, who is a bookseller by trade, recommended it to me. 4 reviews. With its deeply realized characters, moral intricacy, brilliant writing and a page-turning plot, “Valentine” rewards its readers’ generosity with innumerable good things in glorious abundance. Log off!’ teacher orders students when sexual assault livestreamed during first grader’s remote learning class, ‘The West Wing’ cast reunites again, this time for a book.
Situated in the heart of oil country, Odessa, Texas, is said to have been named after Odessa, Ukraine, because of the shortgrass prairie’s resemblance to the desolate, flat and unforested steppes. I also immediately felt my heritage in this novel, even glimpsing my grandma Jenna—a homemaker who never graduated from college but taught me every constellation in the sky—in the women of Valentine. For years to come, Gloria’s name “will hover like a swarm of yellow jackets over the local girls, her story a warning about what not to do, what never to do.”, After opening forcefully in Gloria’s perspective, Wetmore’s kaleidoscopic narration rotates among several other area women, revealing the town and its tensions from an array of perspectives. But it is this core group around whom the story revolves and captures the hearts of readers. A malefic valentine card first alerts Jillian Talbot that her picture-perfect life may be in danger. LONE STAR “I’m 52 and this is my first novel,” says Elizabeth Wetmore, the author of “Valentine,” which is now at No. There are other characters, of course, like Karla the waitress and Jesse, the soldier home from the war who lives in a drainpipe, who fill out a vivid picture of life in an oil town. . More annoyed than terrified, however, she dismisses the hateful missive as the work of a disaffected fan. Told through the alternating points of view of indelible characters who burrow deep in the reader’s heart, this fierce, unflinching, darkly funny, 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. In most cases, the reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. With a voice uniquely her own, author Elizabeth Wetmore weaves together the threads of each desperate life into a compelling tragedy that cries out, unheard, for justice.

From the beginning, I was drawn to the book’s setting: a western corner of my home state of Texas. If the devil comes knocking on your front door in the middle of the night, she liked to say, chances are you flirted with him at the dance.” This reviewer would like to ask her if she thought that applied to Glory Ramirez.

. Valentine Reviews. This is a novel that gives the impression of having been lived with for a long time – too long perhaps. First, there’s Mary Rose, the 26-year-old rancher’s wife whose farmhouse is the one Gloria comes to in the wake of her assault, and who becomes a key witness in the prosecution of Strickland. Log off!’ teacher orders students when sexual assault livestreamed during first grader’s remote learning class, Second stimulus check updates: Pelosi reports some progress ahead of deadline for reaching pre-election deal, but COVID-19 relief bill may be far off, Another chance at stimulus checks: IRS reaching out to those who haven’t received $1,200 payments yet. 3.71 out of 5.

doesn’t understand, but she’s no dummy.” So too is there Ginny, D.A.’s mother who has left her husband and daughter — at least temporarily — taking “five hundred dollars from their joint account and one of the road atlases from the family bookcase” in order to drive “out of West Texas as if her life depends upon it.”. Elizabeth Wetmore .

Of the alcoholism she’s developed in her husband’s absence, for instance, “Corinne would gladly explain to anybody who cared to ask, “I am not a drunk, I’m just drinking all the time. Publisher: Harper (April 7, 2020)Genre: Historical FictionISBN-10: 0062913263ISBN-13: 978-0062913265. And there’s Debra Ann, the young girl who lives across the street from Corinne, whose mother, Ginny, suddenly took off one day—“left town, left a note and most of her clothes, left Debra Ann and her daddy.” But Debra Ann is convinced her mom will be back some day, so she keeps the house straight while she worries about her dad—“who doesn’t sleep enough”—because when her mom does come home, “Debra Ann doesn’t want the house to be such a mess that her mom turns around and walks right back out the door again. “Every book has at least one good thing,” D. A. tells her misfit friend Jesse, a generous idea for a reader to hold.

Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. There is a world of difference between the two. By Elizabeth Wetmore, Harper, 320 pages, $26.99, Elizabeth Wetmore, a West Texas native who now lives in Chicago, is the author of "Valentine. "Valentine" (Harper) by Elizabeth Wetmore Don't be misled by the title of Elizabeth Wetmore's excellent debut novel, "Valentine." Join now and get 2 months free!

Books, audiobooks, and more. There’s Corrine, a retired schoolteacher recently widowed, still coping with the loss of her beloved Potter. Additionally, Wetmore — a West Texas native who now lives in Chicago — weaves in the voices of Suzanne Ledbetter, a holier-than-thou housewife and busybody who strives for financial independence by selling Avon and Tupperware, and last but not least, the first-person-plural voices of the waitress co-workers of Karla, the ex-bartender at the country club where Corinne sometimes drinks.

Mercy is hard in a place like this . Gregory Maguire says his latest book ‘is like comfort food’, ‘Log off! It is not a gentle narrative that begets sweet memories of …

Her similes would give Raymond Chandler a run for his money, as when she writes that to the hungover Corinne, “the day is lit up like an interrogation room, the sun a fierce bulb in an otherwise empty sky,” or that “outside of Ginny’s windshield, the I-20 lies stretched out like a dead body.” Or, more earthily, that the gas-fume stink of the region is “like every cow in West Texas farted at the same time.”. . A time when money mattered and women were treated unfairly.

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( Log Out /  Having taught countless young women like Gloria and Mary Rose, Corinne observes, gazing at the Bunny Club, “a strip club sharing a parking lot with the mobile library” that “it is a damned miracle (…) that any girl in Odessa makes it out alive.”, Then, there’s Corinne’s neighbor on Larkspur Lane: 10-year-old Debra Ann Pierce, who goes by D.A. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account.

But so too is her narration lively and comic, interjecting her characters’ perspectives with humor that serves to underscore their anger and sadness. Valentine Elizabeth Wetmore, 2020 HarperCollins 320 pp.

The crime will soon bind together a group of lonely souls in 1970s Odessa, Texas, as they gear up for what they hope will be the Permian Basin’s next oil boom. . A native of West Texas, she lives and works in Chicago. There, a smell of desperation mixes with the taste of bitterness of past oil booms gone bust, mixed with sweet anticipation of another gusher just over the horizon. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, as well as a grant from the Barbara Deming Foundation.

", Wetmore’s delight in language enlivens every page. Valentine: A Novel by Elizabeth Wetmore is a historical fiction that is sure to take you away to another place, another time when violence against women was swept under the rug and never made it to the courtroom.

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