From its chilling opening to its haunting conclusion, this astonishing novel will resonate with many readers.
The brutal rape of a Mexican American teenager on Valentine’s Day and its traumatic aftereffects on several Anglo women in 1970s small-town West Texas drive Wetmore’s searing, propulsive debut.
It’s Feb. 15, 1976, and Odessa, Texas, sitting on the oil-rich Permian Basin, is on the brink of another boom that will attract both prosperity and violence, especially against women. A cafe owner warns her waitresses: “Keep your eyes peeled for the next serial killer.” In a gritty oil town where casual misogyny and racism rule supreme, women’s lives are cheap. But 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez, raped and badly beaten by young roughneck Dale Strickland, who had picked her up at the Sonic drive-in, refuses to become another nameless victim. While her attacker lies passed out in his truck, Glory, as she renames herself, flees barefoot across the barren oil patch to Mary Rose Whitehead’s farmhouse. Her knock on the door changes both their lives. Shocked at the brutality of the crime and frightened by her confrontation with Strickland, who'd followed Glory to her house, the pregnant Mary Rose, who will testify at the upcoming trial, moves into town with her 9-year-old daughter, Aimee Jo. With her husband staying at the ranch, she is further unnerved by threatening phone calls. Her neighbor on Larkspur Lane, retired teacher Corrine Shepard, mourns her late husband by drinking too much and fending off the overtures of lonely 10-year-old Debra Ann Pierce, who longs for the return of her runaway mother, Ginny. Glory holes up in a motel with her uncle; an encounter at the pool sets her on the path to healing. Through these alternating narratives, Wetmore tells a powerful story of female anger, a repressed rage against systematic sexism and racism ready to explode in a “surface blowout.” Glory hopes her rapist “dies young.” Mary Rose’s seething indignation lands her in a holding cell. All this white-hot fury is brilliantly captured in a climactic dust storm that the author must have written in a fever pitch.
From its chilling opening to its haunting conclusion, this astonishing novel will resonate with many readers.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-291326-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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