“A taut, compelling family tale.” –Kirkus Reviews
Millington Valley is a quintessential small Pennsylvania town: families go back generations. Football rules. Kids drink while adults look the other way. High school is a whirlwind of aspiration and rivalry, friendship and jealousy.
When smart and pretty Molly Hanover moves to town and attracts the attention of the football team’s hero, Wade … attention of the football team’s hero, Wade Thornton—a nice guy with a bad drinking habit—longtime friendships are threatened and a popular cheerleader tries to turn the school against Molly.
The young couple’s future is shattered when Wade, drunk, wrecks his truck and Molly is thrown through the windshield. She wakes from a coma to find her beauty marred and her memory full of holes. As she struggles to heal, she becomes sure that something terrible happened before the accident. And there is somebody in the valley who doesn’t want her to remember.
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What The Valley Knows is an absolutely un-put-down-able novel. I’m a mother of three sons, and I happily neglected all of them, hiding myself in the bedroom while they banged on the door, just to find out what would happen at the end.
As a former high school English teacher, and a young adult author myself, I cannot recommend this novel enough. It has something for every single reader.
Young adults will love the points of view from the novel’s two teenage protagonists: Wade, a football superstar and Molly, a tuba-playing band girl with a ton of smarts. Christie flows between the third-person perspectives with an incredible agility. These two teenagers are real, relatable, and vibrant. I wanted to reach out a shake Wade’s screws loose when he makes bad decisions, and give Molly a hug when she finds herself in a horrible situation no young woman should ever have to face.
Plus, the chapters are almost James Patterson short, so even reluctant teen readers will be able to stay riveted through cliff-hanger after cliff-hanger.
Adults will appreciate the outlook of Ann, Molly’s widowed mom trying to keep life together amidst two jobs, a creepy boss, and life with a daughter who won’t open up. Her perspective reminded me quite a bit of one of Kristin Hannah’s female protagonists. Joy Candellaro from COMFORT AND JOY, I believe.
WHAT THE VALLEY KNOWS is set in Millington Valley, a small Pennsylvania town, and the backdrop for Molly’s senior year at a brand new high school. Ann drags a reluctant Molly to the new town for a paralegal job, and now, Molly hates life because of cheerleaders who make her life hell, and jocks who seem too cool for her to connect with.
That is, of course, until she meets Wade. Quarterback of the football team. Falling behind in English. When he’s forced to go to the tutoring center where Molly works, fireworks erupt and the rest is history.
But is it?
Not in this novel. After a gruesome car wreck that leaves Molly disfigured with a horrible truth niggling at the back of her mind, Wade has to come to a conclusion that could cost him his hopes of a football scholarship. And Ann must reconcile that perhaps she hasn’t been as observant of a mother as she could have been to Molly, and maybe everything that happened could have been prevented…if only.
Several times throughout the novel I found myself in tears, or rubbing goosebumps from my arms. WHAT THE VALLEY KNOWS put the reader in me through an emotional ringer, while the writer in me drank in the fluid narration with vivid sensory descriptions, and hoped that Heather Christie is up for a Millington Valley series.
I am not a normal YA reader and I thought I’d be skimming this one but I was hooked from the beginning. I think it was the mother daughter relationship that drew me in. Then, the point of view – letting you see what each person was thinking and not just being stuck in one teenager’s head – that drew me in further. The characters felt like someone you know and the town like one you might have visited, or have grown up in. Oh – I wanted a more visceral end to that guy (no spoiler) but life isn’t that way, is it? It made it feel all the more real for it too.
*5 Stars*
ARC kindly received in exchange for an honest review.
This is Heather Christie’s first book, and let me tell you, she knocked it out of the park with this one. It’s going to be a series and I can’t wait for the next one.
The story follows three main POV’s – that of Molly, who to me is the main character, that of Wade, her boyfriend and the popular jock from school, and that of Ann, Molly’s mother.
Even though they all get their points of view told, and we get to understand each them, this story is ultimately Molly’s. So many things happen to her in this book, and all of them are realistic. This isn’t one of those books where you think, oh that would unlikely happen in real life, because unfortunately, it can and it does.
The story builds up and up until the accident that leaves Molly with holes in her memory, and until she remembers what it was that happened and that she wanted to tell people, things skate along telling the story of recovery of more than one character.
I could totally understand Molly’s thoughts and confidence loss after the accident, and even though it was frustrating to read at times, its real. I could only imagine being in that situation. When things finally come to a head at the end of the novel, people are starting to heal in more ways than one, and I suppose things will slowly go back to some semblance of normal for these characters.
The characters were quite well written, particularly for the first novel of an author, and there were characters that I really really disliked. You’ll know who when you read this. That said, there were also characters that I really did like, so it evens out quite nicely.
I didn’t really feel the romance so much between Wade and Molly, but the book doesn’t focus around the romance. To me this wasn’t a love story. This was the learning curve of life, and the horrible things that some people unfortunately come to face in their lives, and the aftermath of dealing with said events.
I’m not sure if the next book will be a continuation from where we left off, or if it will be about some else in Millington Valley, but either way I’m really looking forward to it.
Definitely recommend this book, its real, its emotional and it was hard to put down.