Valentine: A Read with Jenna Pick
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
An instant New York Times Bestseller
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
A 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 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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Elizabeth Wetmore. (2020). Valentine: A Read with Jenna Pick. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Elizabeth Wetmore. 2020. Valentine: A Read With Jenna Pick. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine: A Read With Jenna Pick. HarperCollins, 2020.
MLA Citation (style guide)Elizabeth Wetmore. Valentine: A Read With Jenna Pick. HarperCollins, 2020.
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 19 | 19 |
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Elizabeth Wetmore is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Epoch, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Iowa Review, and other literary journals. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, as well as a grant from the Barbara Deming Foundation. She was also a Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf and a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and one of six Writers in Residence at Hedgebrook. A native of West Texas, she lives and works in Chicago.
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An instant New York Times Bestseller
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
A 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 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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"A thrilling debut. . . . Like Miriam Toews' Women Talking, Valentine is a story about how women—particularly women without much education or money—negotiate a culture of masculine brutality. 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. . . . Carefully wrought and emotionally compelling." — Washington Post
"A monument to a sort of singular grace, and true grit." — Entertainment Weekly
"Valentine, Elizabeth Wetmore's fierce and brilliant debut novel, is set in Odessa, a rough-edged West Texas town built on cattle and oil. It evokes the physicality of the place with a visceral power that recalls Cormac McCarthy, and sets out its cultural ambience and mores with the ironic clarity of Larry McMurtry. This literary landscape has been defined by men as surely as the reality it represents. Wetmore sweeps them to the sidelines, defiantly and confidently claiming West Texas for the women and girls. . . . Valentine joins the best Texas novels ever written." — Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Excellent. . . . Tense and riveting. . . . D.A. emerges a gritty, welcome addition to American literature's pantheon of young heroines. . . . Wetmore, a native of West Texas and graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, offers with her first novel a harrowing narrative of a region she knows well, described with precision and passion." — Associated Press
"Exceptional. . . .Wetmore, like Harper Lee before her, has little interest in preserving the illusions of people who believe that justice and love will always prevail. . . . an incredibly moving and emotionally devastating piece of work that heralds great things from Wetmore." — Houston Chronicle
"Wetmore's characters offer perspectives that cross generations, socioeconomic classes and races. Yet all characters serve to showcase the resilience of women and the power that comes in deciding the direction of one's own story." — San Francisco Chronicle
"Gripping and complex. . . . Wetmore's delight in language enlivens every page. . . . With its deeply realized characters, moral intricacy, brilliant writing and a page-turning plot, Valentine rewards its readers' generosity with innumerable good things in glorious abundance." — Chicago Tribune
"Valentine shines with strong characters, some sympathetic, others detestable, and a complex plot with narrative threads smoothly knitted together." — The Missourian
"Fierce and complex, VALENTINE is a novel of moral urgency and breathtaking prose. This is the very definition of a stunning debut." — Ann Patchett
"It is nearly impossible for me to believe that Elizabeth Wetmore is a first-time novelist. How can a writer burst out of the gate with this much firepower and skill? VALENTINE is brilliant, sharp, tightly wound, and devastating. Wetmore has ripped the brutal, epic landscape of West Texas out of the hands of men, and has handed the stories over (finally!) to the girls and women who have always suffered, survived, and made their mark in such a hostile world. These are some of the most fully realized and unforgettable female characters I've ever met. They will stay with me." — Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of City of Girls
"A testament to the resilience of the female spirit. . . .Wetmore's prose is both beautiful and bone-true, and this mature novel hardly feels like a...
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Starred review from January 13, 2020
Wetmore’s stirring debut follows a group of women as they find the strength to survive a series of hardships in 1970s Odessa, Tex. After oil rigger Dale Strickland is charged with the rape of 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez, the town is split between those who believe he is guilty and those who believe she brought it on herself and who cast bigoted aspersions about Gloria and her family. Mary Rose Whitehead, pregnant with her second child and feeling alienated from her rancher husband, envisions a brutal comeuppance for Strickland and bonds unexpectedly with the reclusive Corrine Shepard, a recent widow who shares in her outrage (“as if there might have been some moral ambiguity, Corrine thinks bitterly, if Gloria Ramírez had been sixteen, or white”). Ten-year-old Debra Ann, whose mother abandoned her and whose father lets her wander freely, leaves behind imaginary friendships to help Jesse Belden, a luckless Vietnam vet. With Mary Rose as a major witness for the prosecution, Gloria eventually gets her day in court, though the outcome doesn’t please anyone. As a storm threatens Odessa, Debra Anne watches a “thousand-foot cloud rise up from the earth,” setting the stage for a series of potential tragedies, culminating with Mary Rose’s ire stoked by the sight of her neighbor Debra Ann walking with Jesse, a stranger to her. Wetmore poetically weaves the landscape of Odessa and the internal lives of her characters, whose presence remains vivid after the last page is turned. This moving portrait of West Texas oil country evokes the work of Larry McMurtry and John Sayles with strong, memorable female voices.
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December 1, 2019
Set in Odessa, Texas, in 1976, Wetmore's debut is the haunting story of Gloria Ramirez, a 14-year-old girl who is attacked, raped, and left for dead in an oil patch. Miraculously, Gloria survives, setting off a whirlwind of events that leads to a trial. Odessa is not the type of place where justice is the expected norm, and the trial results in a showdown with shocking consequences. The story is narrated by alternating female voices, including Mary Rose Whitehead, a young mother who was the first to encounter Gloria after the attack; Corinne Shepard, a recent widow who self-medicates with alcohol; and Debra Ann Pierce, a 10-year-old girl. The grim and oppressive landscape evokes the characters' hopeless feelings, but even in this environment there is still hope. Drawing comparisons to Barbara Kingsolver and Wallace Stegner, Wetmore writes with an evidently innate wisdom about the human spirit. With deep introspection, she expertly unravels the complexities between men, women, and the land they inhabit. Achingly powerful, this story will resonate with readers long after having finished it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
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June 1, 2020
The brutal rape of a Mexican American teenager on Valentine's Day and its traumatic aftereffects on several Anglo women in 1970s small-town West Texas drive Wetmore's searing, propulsive debut. It's Feb. 15, 1976, and Odessa, Texas, sitting on the oil-rich Permian Basin, is on the brink of another boom that will attract both prosperity and violence, especially against women. A cafe owner warns her waitresses: "Keep your eyes peeled for the next serial killer." In a gritty oil town where casual misogyny and racism rule supreme, women's lives are cheap. But 14-year-old Gloria Ram�rez, raped and badly beaten by young roughneck Dale Strickland, who had picked her up at the Sonic drive-in, refuses to become another nameless victim. While her attacker lies passed out in his truck, Glory, as she renames herself, flees barefoot across the barren oil patch to Mary Rose Whitehead's farmhouse. Her knock on the door changes both their lives. Shocked at the brutality of the crime and frightened by her confrontation with Strickland, who'd followed Glory to her house, the pregnant Mary Rose, who will testify at the upcoming trial, moves into town with her 9-year-old daughter, Aimee Jo. With her husband staying at the ranch, she is further unnerved by threatening phone calls. Her neighbor on Larkspur Lane, retired teacher Corrine Shepard, mourns her late husband by drinking too much and fending off the overtures of lonely 10-year-old Debra Ann Pierce, who longs for the return of her runaway mother, Ginny. Glory holes up in a motel with her uncle; an encounter at the pool sets her on the path to healing. Through these alternating narratives, Wetmore tells a powerful story of female anger, a repressed rage against systematic sexism and racism ready to explode in a "surface blowout." Glory hopes her rapist "dies young." Mary Rose's seething indignation lands her in a holding cell. All this white-hot fury is brilliantly captured in a climactic dust storm that the author must have written in a fever pitch. From its chilling opening to its haunting conclusion, this astonishing novel will resonate with many readers.COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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An instant New York Times Bestseller
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
A 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 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...
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