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.
... a novel that serpentines around our expectations ... This is the story of their lives in a backwater oil town in the mid-1970s, which Wetmore seems to know with empathy so deep it aches ... If these chapters weren’t so carefully wrought and emotionally compelling, they might feel like mere distractions from the prosecution of Gloria’s attacker ... Several of these chapters are masterful short stories in their own right, but Wetmore knits them together with increasing intensity ... Wetmore has written something thrilling and thoughtful. Don’t let the launch of this novelist’s career be drowned out. Someday book clubs will meet again, and this would be a rousing choice.
Valentine is an angry novel, a blast of feminist outrage against a toxic culture that breeds racism and violence against women. The narrative hurtles forward with urgency of a thriller, and it emulates the darkest spy fiction by making it painfully apparent that the good guys are at least as likely as the bad guys to be punished. Elizabeth Wetmore’s mingled love and fury for her native West Texas electrifies her prose; despite its grim subject matter, her first novel is exhilarating to read, because the characters are so alive, the drama that engages them so compelling ... interconnected stories play out against the backdrop of a harsh, lonely land lovingly evoked by Wetmore ... She’s not painting a pretty picture here, but it’s palpably real, and her characters’ grit and resilience infuse the novel with a spirit of hard-won resolution ... a gripping, galvanizing tale from a strong new voice in American fiction.
Elizabeth Wetmore’s debut novel, Valentine, is a revelation not for what it explores but how. Set in the 1970s Odessa oil boom, the book carefully builds complex authenticity throughout ... This novel is made for the #MeToo era. Told from the point of view of the women who usually take a back seat in historical Texas fiction, Valentine gives us what we didn’t know we were missing. Female anger, check. Female vengeance, check. An all-female car chase? Hell yes! ... The racism and sexism depicted in the novel are real, and there’s a feeling of satisfaction to see Valentine hold up a mirror to the prejudice that existed and exists in that part of the world (and so many others). That said, the novel’s moral stakes draw a stark line between good and evil. The reader is never asked to do any tough work, to look at herself or think about his own complicity ... In her debut, Wetmore is firing on all cylinders. She masterfully juggles the complex chronology of her structure—rich embedded flashbacks, surprising and satisfying flash-forwards. She describes the land with a gorgeous lyricism...and uses the concrete, physical world to develop her fascinating characters’ emotional lives ... Go out and buy this book. Make it the success it deserves to be.
