An instant New York Times BestsellerA Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
“A thrilling debut that deserves your attention.” –Ron Charles, the Washington Post
Written with the haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout and Barbara Kingsolver, an astonishing debut novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s, longlisted … explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the VCU Cabell First Novel Award.
Mercy is hard in a place like this . . .
It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow.
In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field—an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences.
Valentine is a haunting exploration of the intersections of violence and race, class and region in a story that plumbs the depths of darkness and fear, yet offers a window into beauty and hope. Told through the alternating points of view of indelible characters who burrow deep in the reader’s heart, this fierce, unflinching, and surprisingly tender novel illuminates women’s strength and vulnerability, and reminds us that it is the stories we tell ourselves that keep us alive.
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Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore is an intense, very powerful story about Gloria Ramirez who is fourteen years old and is savagely beaten and raped in the oil fields in West Texas. Readers will be spellbound as barely alive Gloria rises and escapes as her drunken rapist is passed out. Only by her sheer strength and fight to live did she make it to the home of Mary Rose
for help. As the story unfolds, you learn the true strength and determination of the incredible women who stood up and defended Gloria in the courtroom and in their hometown. The author’s in
depth description of these characters is spellbinding and her description of life in West Texas during the 1970’s is nothing short of pure genius. I received an Advanced Reader Copy of this book and these are my opinions only. It is very hard for me to rate it a five, because in my opinion, it is a ten.