This page Turner kept me diverted to very screen. I felt the hand of Truman Capote and the heat and dust of To Kill a Mockingbird. The characters are superbly drawn and I loved all the right ones and hated all the right ones too. The hideous dark undertow of deep racism although depicted in a different era has echoes in the world around us right now. A truly great book that deserves to do superbly well. The style is bluntly modern but once you get over the lack of conventional pun c.f.tuition it kind of adds a layer of authenticity. Not just five stars but ten stars.

It's a very well written historical fiction opening with a crime, a bit trigger warning at the beginning. Then there are interwoven eb=vents following this crime.
I think it's a well-executed book, and the author didn't follow an easy route. I really appreciate her talent, research, and beautiful writing. The story was compelling as well.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

I think this is the best book I've read in the past year. The perfect combination of beautiful writing and memorable characters. I found myself boiling with anger and sitting on the edge of my seat. So many Texas specific references that reminded me of my childhood. Would absolutely recommend this book. I'd love to read more from this author!

Set in the 70's in Odessa, Texas as the oil boom started. A young girl has a truly traumatic experience. The story follows several woman as they become connected with the crime. It took a while to get used to the writing style and the various timelines but once I got into it I discovered a cleverly written story. The descriptions so vivid of this vast, humid, remote location with all the newcomers. It covers some dark subjects and some truly disturbing characters. It was definitely a mans world. A good, different read.

Despite impressive characterisations and a deeply moving and compelling dilemma .. getting a rapist of an under age girl convicted! In southern racist town USA .. I had to force myself to keep reading. Maybe it was too painful? Reflecting what we know is happening all over the world with women being brutalised by men now more than ever in lockdown! The narrative solution of telling the tale from diverse female points of view was wearing to read, but makes perfect sense .. and that's the thing that put me off .. sort of an outside agenda .. admirable without doubt ... but deflects the narrative line. Amazing atmosphere is depicted in wonderful detail and feels authentic .. congratulations! Important topic, well developed ...

Valentine's Day 1976. Odessa, Texas. A teenage girl appears early in the morning on the porch of a house in the middle of the oil fields, naked and beaten badly. The woman who opens the door is pregnant with a small child in the house, and lets the young girl in. Soon later there is another knock on the door; this time it's her attacker.

Valentine opens in this way - the first chapter told from the teenage girl's point of view, and then from the perspective of other women around the town, including a young girl who has been left pretty much to her own devices since her mother left town and a neighbouring teacher whose husband recently past away. Some of these women are connected to the young girl's rape, some aren't, but their reaction to the event and their relationships and interactions over the following months make up the rest of the novel.

I thought this was a really great debut novel, well paced and plotted and with believable characters. Recommended!

Many moons ago I used to regularly road trip my way to and from grad school and my parent's home - a trip that took place almost entirely along Interstate 10, granting me about a 20 hour long drive through the state of Texas. Aside from the area around San Antonio, much of this drive consisted of the same endless, flat, desolate backdrop as far as my eye could see. Elizabeth Wetmore's beautiful debut novel captures the desolation and desperation interred in the Texas landscape through the lens of various women living through the ups and downs of the mid-70's Texas oil boom.

The story begins in 1976 with the brutal assault of Gloria Ramirez (self-born again as Glory), a young Mexican American girl living in Odessa, by the local preachers son. The assault kicks off a maelstrom of events and brings together, to varying degrees, a group of disparate women who live in and around the town. Wetmore pushes the story forward through the pov's of each of the women, diving into their present and past lives that serve to place them on either side of the debate of who to blame and how to respond to the assault. This narrative structure, at times, feels a bit forced, but does shine with a few of the characters. The particular standouts are the characters of Corinne Shepard and Mary Rose Whitehead. Corrine is the older woman who spends most of her time nursing the grief over losing her husband deep in a bottle of bourbon. She is wise and wounded and I felt her in my bones. Mary Rose is the young mother who is the first to see Glory post-rape and funnels all of her anger and resentment at her place in a dead-end marriage in a dead-end town in fighting for justice and vengeance on behalf of Glory. There is something so wrenching about her anger and her knowing deep in her core that women at that time, in that place don't get a fair shake, but she keeps gnawing anyway, like a dog who is getting kicked but keeps ahold of that bone anyway.

There is so much in this story....about race, rape culture, misogyny, motherhood, love, and hate. It's all centered around some wonderfully complex portraits of women struggling in an unforgiving place. There is a lot of brutality and pain and tons of grit. Well worth the read.

Thank you to Netgalley, Fourth Estate and the author for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for this arc. I’ve seen amazing reviews for this debut, so was excited to read this and wow! What a scorching, assuredly-written, gut-punching novel, this is full of brilliantly gritty characterisations in 1970s Texas.
This books opens with Gloria (later renamed Glory) who is lying in the dirt. Gloria is an American-Mexican, only 14-years old. She’s just been beaten and raped. She sits quietly hoping her abuser doesn’t wake up and kill her. Slowly, slowly she manages to walk to the nearest house, a ranch, in this barren land. She knocks on the door of Mary-Rose. The POV in the narrative switches to Mary-Rose, who got pregnant and dropped out of high school when she was 17-years old. She now lives with her husband and 9-year old daughter, pregnant with her second child. When Gloria knocks on her door she’s conflicted; then realising how this girl is only a few years older than her daughter she empathises and helps the girl by calling the police and later testifying at the trial. We then follow Corinne, who is grieving the death of her husband. Corinne used to work at the school but lost her job due to being far too opinionated. She goes to the bar and drinks to pass time where she hears about the rape of the young girl. Corinne and her husband saw Gloria getting into the truck and feel guilty that they didn’t act on their instinct and intervene. We also see the POV of 10-year old Debra-Ann, Corinne’s neighbour, and Ginny, Debra’s mother, who left her family and drove off to find a job and make some money.
I highly enjoyed this character-driven read about being a women in the small town of Odessa, Texas, that is bereft of opportunities for women, a dusty, hard place. Wetmore’s writing is hypnotising with vivid descriptions of this hot, dry land that goes on for miles and is full of creatures that rattle and crawl, as well as the superb psychologies of each of the characters. This is a story about small communities and what it takes to survive, and how important the support of the neighbours are. The rapist Dale Strickland, is young, white and the son of a preacher. Supporting Glory has repercussions for Mary-Rose whose phone rings into the night with threats, even her husband begrudges her for having opened the door at all on top of testifying. Valentine is about people, how their lives intersect in this hot, humid town and trans-generational guilt. My only gripe is that there were too many POVs of some characters, who don’t even reappear, such as Ginny, and the last few chapters with Evelyn and Karla were unnecessary in my opinion and drawn out. I was most invested in Glory, Mary-Rose, Corinne and Debra Ann, and when these other characters appear out of nowhere I felt like the main story was getting diluted and would’ve benefited from a tighter narrative.
On the whole evocative and atmospheric, reminiscent of the works of Carson McCullers and Mm Marilynn Robinson, Wetmore conjures up the gritty landscape of Texas and explores the themes of racism and bigotry in a small town and the effect that violence has on the lives of women. 4/5

Wetmore's writing is so pliant and assured that I was sure I was going to love this. But as the stories shift and transform, as we switch from woman to woman, especially when one of the PoV characters is a 10 year old girl, I started to not so much lose interest as feel that the book lacks a centre to hold the whole thing together. In some ways, this is the role for Gloria/Glory yet we're often very far from her traumatic tale as we switch back in time to back stories of various townswomen only connected to her in the most tangential fashion.

There's no doubt that Wetmore can deal with hard-hitting topics: not just the rape but also, for example, the experience of a woman whose husband has been given a terminal diagnosis - this all feels so true and honest and authentic that it deserves to be more relevant to the story being unwound. I can see how this might be compared to Elizabeth Strout, composed as it is of individual stories that coalesce in a single town. It's just that, for me, there wasn't enough pull-through or tension in the story. I wanted all the lovely writing and the rounded characters to go somewhere but they don't. Sure, real life might drift, directionless, but it can be frustrating when a novel does.

A hugely talented author but next time I'd like to see a slightly more coherent story emerge: 3.5 stars.

Valentine, Elizabeth Wetmore

Review from Jeannie Zelos book reviews

Genre: Women's Fiction, General fiction

Gah, I hate Women's Fiction as a genre heading, so outdated. Men and women can read the same books....its 2019, not 1919.

Anyway, I wanted to like this story, it sounded perfect for me, one that would make me think about the characters and their actions from all points. Sadly I just didn't like it.
I didn't like the writing style, its one of those with no quotation marks to denote speech, which makes text puzzling at times. Then we'd just from one POV to another, from past to present and vice versa, all within the same page, no defining markers to show where one part ends and the next starts. That seems to be a growing trend in some novels and one I do not like!

The characters were grim, unremittingly grim, and I just couldn't feel for any of them. I need to be onside with a couple of characters but here I felt sorry for some but still didn't like them.
Most of the book seemed to feature everyone but Valentine/Glory, when I was expecting the story to centre around her and what happened to her. I was expecting a kind of To Kill A Mockingbird drama but instead got something very different.
The bigotry, the sexism and the harshness of life was very real, but without anything to balance that it made for some hard reading. When characters did do whats right, I wasn't convinced by their actions. It seemed though most were true to time, ( having lived through seventies, albeit in UK, I know how different attitudes were to today), there were a couple that would stand up for rights, but I didn't really understand why. They didn't appear to have any history suggesting they cared about women's rights, racism, or the environment, but just suddenly one thing fired them up, but without any real reason.
Then there's the trial – given the circumstances it simply wouldn't have taken place, rape trials are hard at best of times, back then with a victim who wouldn't testify, a Mexican against a white man, it just would have been ignored. And the financial reparation – since when did that happen in criminal trials? I think if authors are going to include this kind of detail even in fiction, as its purporting to be a realistic story it needs to have consequences that would happen in real life, not ones that the author invents.

Stars: Two, I can see others love it, but for me it was a fail sadly.

ARC supplied by Netgalley and publisher

Its 1976 in Odessa, Texas and in the early hours of the morning just after Valentines day Gloria a fourteen year old daughter of a immigrant is viciously and brutally attacked and raped and drags herself to the nearest ranch that of Mary Rose.
Instantly this event pulled me right in and then we are introduced to a host of all different characters who have their take on the event as each section of the book is split in to points of view of the females in the male dominated oil town. The women are different ages & at different stages in life but what they all want is justice, justice for Gloria and themselves .
The author cleverly created a really interesting diverse range of characters to tell this story.
And the landscape and weather were very atmospheric and I easily could visualise it all.
The book touches on many issues such as rape, abuse, suicide, sexism, racism, immigration but it has a undertone of sensitivity at all times.
I struggled in parts with the constant switching of characters and thought the ending would be a stronger but still this is a book I enjoyed.
My thanks go to the publisher, author and Netgalley in providing this arc in return for a honest review.

I was suprised by this book. I found the opening really difficult to get through, but once I was past that I found the strength of desire I'd had to push it away was only matched by my need to keep on reading. I found myself by turns terrified, angry, and simply stunned by the beauty of the writing. This is a book I will recommend widely.

Valentine starts in a brutal manner, picking up in the immediate aftermath of an evil attack on Gloria Ramirez and what unfolds from there is a story of the women of Odessa, Texas in 1976. I think this is a perfect way to tell this story, through the eyes of only women in a time and place rife with sexism, judgement, violence and injustice. The attack on Gloria is the catalyst for much of what happens but there are so many different aspects to Valentine and the perspectives of the women it examines.

The first thing I have to say about this book is that it deals with the environment brilliantly. The setting is incredibly evocative, you can almost feel the blistering and oppressive heat and see the dust storms. Wetmore describes Odessa in such a brutal and uncompromising manner and I was glued to the story from beginning to end. All of the women that we meet in Valentine are fascinating and equally intriguing. It’s so interesting to discover how these women are all interlinked as we learn more and more about them. They are different ages and have different experiences but one thing that seems to connect them all is the struggle they face being women in such a harsh place. There are times that Valentine is desperately sad and grim but there is also so much strength in these women, both young and old which stops the book becoming too depressing or hopeless.

I think Valentine is a supremely well written and assured debut and I can’t believe this is Wetmore’s first book. It is incredibly visceral and heart-wrenching in the way it examines race, gender, class, violence and grief. I will be eagerly anticipating whatever Wetmore writes next.

I liked the promise of a teenage girl's rape and its aftermaths, but this book is much more than that... and maybe too much. It would have been enough to see the story through the girl's point of view and through the other women involved. But when the author started to narrate the childhood of the neighbour of the first witness... It became a bit of a stretch.

Make no mistake: I understand the social aim and the importance of reporting on the years of financial crisis in rural America - plus the writing is good. It just wasn't what I expected.

I think I am the audience for this book. I love stories revolving around small communities. People living in harsh environments: even better. Valentine fits this mold perfectly: a small community in the heart of North America's South, in the middle of the nowhere. A land rich in oil and nothing else but desert. Hard lands give birth to strong characters, interesting human beings. And here we have an array of very interesting women. Women who defy convention; women who defy the status quo, women who are not afraid to beat you to a pulp where you to believe yourself an entitled prick; women who might appear to be the typical Southern belle yet in a fight of their own to escape their roots, women who are not afraid to pick up a gun to defend themselves and teach their daughters the same skills. Women who burrowed under my skin and reminded me why I am not ashamed to be one myself and why I never wanted to be anything else but a woman.

Glory, Mary Rose, Corrine, Debra Ann, Ginny, Suzanne, Karla - your stories will not be forgotten!

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore. I had heard good things about this story and had really wanted to read it.
The writing was different and at first I was not sure I was going to enjoy it. And I'm still not sure I did. The bad things- I didn't enjoy the way the writer would switch characters in chapters and at times, it wasn't clear who the character was. I got pretty confused at times. I did not think the story flowed like the descriptive writing did. In other words, the characters were written in a jumbled way, yet the beautiful language used to describe Texas, and all it's dust, oil and glory was simply poetic. That was great writing.
I wanted to know more about Gloria aka Glory. I felt like the author introduced her in an amazing way, and then sort of moved on for quite awhile with a lot of other characters mixed in. I kept reading more and hoping to find her again. And I did, but to me it wasn't enough.
I enjoyed the story. It was convoluted throughout but worth the read.

A different kind of novel. This one shows us very definitely that women are stronger than you might think. Various females in this story cope with abuse, rape, keeping a family together and even disdain and ridicule from their own kind.
We discover that running a home, having a baby isn’t always the natural and easy thing we think it should be. A young teenage girl finds her word of assault isn’t believed and makes life in her town almost too difficult to cope with. It’s hard at times to comprehend that these cases are the sort of thing that could happen but it does show how strongwomen are when they have to be.

Plot: 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.

Sounds intense right? This book was SO good. Although it sounds like it is going to be focused on Gloria, the book is about so much more than that. It’s about ALL the girls/women in Odessa, Texas in the 1970s. A time and place where men dominated everything, this is the story gives women a voice.

The book is heavily character driven (in case you hadn’t guessed!) each chapter alternates between several different women’s point of views - which I loved. I think my favourite was that of Mary Rose.

Beautifully written, pulls at your heartstrings, full of brave and courageous female characters - a must add to your TBR.

Up on blog next week

Wow what a debut. If this is what this author comes out with for her first novel, I can't wait to see what she comes out with next.

I found out so much about life in Texas and the Texanan wildlife. The writing is so vivid you can feel the relentless heat and taste the dust. The actual story is quite simple but the characters it concerns are very well described and completely 3 dimensional. This is a polished well written debut novel which has a strong social conscience.