Valentine

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.