by George Graziani
I encountered The Vales through a Facebook group I'm in, where I serve as a reviewer of (mostly) independently published books. Organized by the admins of this group, the review event takes place bimonthly, and involves reviewers submitting a short biography to the organizer. Authors who are looking for reviews of their work reply to the organizer, selecting the reviewer of their choice. Reviewers then select which authors and books they'd agree to review based on the descriptions of the books.
My review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for prose and writing, ⭐️⭐️⭐️ for storytelling. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for character development. An overall rating of ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
The Vales is an intensely character-driven novel revolving around two, intertwined stories, and taking place over the course of a long weekend. The first centers on a family gathering at the home of the grandparents, while the other is a criminal misadventure. Both stories run parallel — until they collide, drawing the innocent family into chaos. Both tales unfold through first person accounts of the events in real time, each chapter devoted to the perspective of one of the characters.
The Vales comprise of Grace and Joseph, the matriarch and patriarch of the family. It is their home where the weekend gathering takes place. Their children, Eva and Bobby, are middle-aged adults with families of their own. Eva has her husband, Adam and a wild teenage daughter, Ziggy. Bobby has his wife, Renata, and two boys, Danny and Roland, who are a little younger than their cousin.
This is a novel seeking to excavate the layers of motivation — emotional, cultural, and pragmatic — behind an individual’s actions. Each narrator exposes their most vulnerable selves in these pages, with a deeply intimate result. The reader is privy to each narrator’s desires, secrets, and fears — even those they are unwilling to acknowledge themselves. The flawed natures of the characters are sure to evoke a sense of empathy in the reader; there’s someone we recognize in each of them, our own mothers, aunts, uncles, friends.
The prose throughout the novel therefore changes voice frequently; the pitch and tone of Danny’s chapters reflect the concerns of a boy on the edge of puberty, while Bobby’s are the stuff of adult-sized angst. The prose is very well-crafted, but this reader found this recurrent shift in voice created a superfluousness that did not pay an eventual reward. This was also due, in part, to the content of each narrator’s chapter.
Because of the story unfolds through the eyes of several narrators and each one provides an account of events in the present tense, there is a redundancy in the retelling of events which the reader already knew about. The telling and multiple retelling of the same events by different narrators did not progress the story. Instead this tendency caused the novel to sag in several parts. It was unfortunate that the different perspectives did not add conflict or dramatic effect to the events.
The intense interiority of each narration also produced other jarring effects. Perhaps the author submerged this reader too well, too deeply, with their intimate prose because the the shifts in narrators pulled this reader from the depths of a character’s mind too soon, leading to breaks in the mood of the moment. The other effect, also a consequence of the deep interior view into the character’s mind, was the character’s mental wandering into tangential domains; the result was the introduction of many supporting characters, too many for this reader to keep track of. Were they important enough to remember? This reader found that many of them were there to serve as foils to the characters themselves, and as such they did not add to the story significantly.
My verdict on The Vales is therefore mixed. On the one hand, it is very well-written and full of well-crafted characters. The character-driven aspect of the work is apparent and very much appreciated. On the other hand, the delivery of the story stagnated at several points and ultimately did not pay out on the promise made in the subtitle: Love, Evil, and Redemption. Of the three, love was most visible. Evil was present, though the events did not quite merit that extreme of a description. Redemption felt rushed at the end; the point at which the two stories slam into each other possessed a moment of conflict that was (to this reader) under-dramatized. The events bringing the Vales into contact with a sordid reality deserved greater attention, not in terms of a play-by-play of the events themselves, but in terms of their meaning to the characters involved.
I am nonetheless glad for the experience of reading it. If you would like to, you can find the novel for sale here. Currently, The Vales is available for purchase at the price of $29.99 for a hardback, $14.93 for a paperback, and $7.46 for the Kindle ebook version. To learn more about the author, you may click here.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 