3.5/5
****TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT*****
Please do not read this book if you get easily triggered by, or if you are sensitive to, scenes of sexual assault.
Basic plot: a young Mexican girl of age 14 is raped by an older white man; this book is basically her story as told through the eyes of numerous women in the town of Odessa, TX where this book takes place.
My thoughts: This book had way too many perspectives. The female characters were all written fine; they were diverse in opinion, with some siding with Glory, the victim/survivor, and others refusing to believe her story and instead, siding with that of her rapist. This book was very...hard to read in the beginning. The first couple of chapters had me anxious. The assault is not explicit per se, but the reader does see the damages done to Glory -- her bruises and scars, her ruptured spleen, etc. It's not graphic, but it's definitely not for the faint of heart. With that, the book did get a lot easier to read, mostly because it kind of turned on a wild tangent...
As I said, this book is told through various perspectives, all of them women. We see Glory, the victim/survivor; we see Mary Rose, the first person to see Glory after the assault; we also see characters like Suzanne, who believes Glory's story is a "minor mishap" or a "miscommunication." I appreciated the way we as an audience get to see sort of the different ways in which rape is seen and portrayed by the community, especially by fellow women.
However, I feel like Glory's story got completely swallowed by all of the different voices. I get what the author was trying to do in not making the entire story about the assault; after all, people's lives go on. However, I feel like it could have been done a lot better. It kind of seemed as though Wetmore was trying to erase the assault as a whole in favor of focusing on the trials and tribulations of housewives, waitresses, etc. It would've been great...if the book was about waitresses and housewives, and not about an assault. It just felt kind of poorly done; rape is something that we tend to brush away and push aside. I feel like a book that told the story of a young girl being assaulted could've been written in a way where the focus was on that young girl, the brutality of her attacker, and the ways in which the justice system so often fails women and girls. Instead, the focus was on a woman going on a camping trip with her husband and a girl helping a man find his way back home.
Overall: this was an alright book, but not a favorite. Definitely was not a favorite for me, but I am glad I read it as I know it's become really popular as of late.