Valentine: Book summary and reviews of Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

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Cathryn Conroy

A Brilliant and Profound Novel About Love, Life, Family, and Faith
This is an exceptional book for and about women. It's about the tragedy of rape. It's about the will to survive. It's about what women will do for one another. It's a story that left me shaking and sad, but also feeling heartened and strong.

This is a book that is character driven with only the bare bones of a plot. It's the day after Valentine's Day in 1976. A 14-year-old Mexican-American girl is brutally raped by a white man. She manages to escape her rapist in the middle of nowhere—an arid, dry, and dusty remote area of Odessa, Texas—and finds help on the front porch of a lonely farmhouse. The story cascades from there like dominoes with each chapter telling a tale from the point of view of a different woman or girl—seven characters in all. While the rape and its ugly connotations of class, race, and "boys will be boys" is the centerpiece of the story, it's not the whole story. There is also hope and solace…and maybe even redemption.

Because this extraordinary debut novel by Elizabeth Wetmore is so profoundly compelling, it's hard to stop reading, but because it's also so emotionally raw and gritty it's just as hard to keep reading. This is one of those rare literary novels that is also at its heart a really, really good story.

Bonus: The descriptions of this remote, heat-encrusted area of Texas are so vivid and realistic that I swear I felt the scorching rays of the sun and the itch of chigger bites and even caught a whiff of the odiferous oil in the oil fields as I was reading. The words were so powerful they actually engaged all my senses.

BuffaloGirlKS

Best Book in a Long, Long Time
This is the best book I have read in a long, long time. The author's descriptions of the West Texas landscape, weather, and 1970s culture are so vivid I could feel the sun bearing down and the grit blowing on my face. Told in alternating voices, one comes to learn each woman's and girl's story and how they support each other and others in need. The depiction of the suppression of women, minorities, and the marginalized in a society controlled by white men is so accurate to that time. The characters are perfect in every way, the progression on the story is perfect, the ending is perfect. This book is flawless.

Sherry K

not your average West Texas cowboy novel
I loved this book from the moment I read the first page. I couldn't put it down. The setting is in oil country, Texas, in the 1970s.The boom is over now but oilmen are expecting another one on its way. This is a story mostly of the women and girls living during this time and place enduring sadness and hardships they are ill-equipped for. This is the working class, housewives, ranchers' wives...there is no glamour here but there is compassion and empathy for each other. This novel is a beautifully written graphic tale which will hold you captive until the last page...literally!

Sandi W.

Seven narrators sounds like a lot...but...
Originally I wanted to give this book 4 stars - I did really enjoy most of it. However this author wrote without quotation marks. WHY??!?! In my opinion, a terrible mistake for an author, especially for a new author. Usually I would have just quit the book and given it away, but due to the insistence of a friend, I read the book. As I said, quotation marks aside, I enjoyed most of it. I thought the ending was rather bizarre and could have been much better, but the overall story kept my attention and I thought was well put together.

There were 7 authors in this book. Each a female - ranging in age from a young child to an older grandmotherly woman. They were all in Odessa Texas, during the beginning of the oil boom. Each person was somehow related to another. And through their narrative we hear the story of Glory, a young 14 year old girl raped by a senseless drunk, 20 some years old, out to get his own enjoyment.

We go through the morning after the rape, right up through, what that town called a 'trial', and the outcome of punishment for the young rapist. The fears, the sacrifices, and the other obligations and challenges of the narrators advance us through the book.

This was a good format that the author did very well. Seven narrators sounds like a lot and that you would get confused, but that does not happen. You read on just to see how these females related to and were intertwined with each other and what their association to Glory was. With a less confusing and more solid ending this book would have been much better.

Now knowing that Wetmore writes without quotation marks, I will thoroughly investigate her next book before picking it up to read - regardless of recommendations.