BLOG TOUR: Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore @harperperennial @harpercollins #valentine #elizabethwetmore #bookreview

Haunting and exquisite, Valentine is the sort of book that when I read it carried this heavy stillness, where nothing else seemed to exist besides me and the story I was reading. This book is so beautifully written, Elizabeth Wetmore is truly talented and brings a depth and authenticity to the heavy topics dealt with in this story. It is also a story that I’m particularly honored to feature on International Women’s Day, being a book filled with incredible women who make small and large actions to support other women, even at the expense of themselves.

About the Book

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.

Reflection

Beginning with the tragic and evocative aftermath of a sexual assault told to us by the 14-year old victim and survivor Gloria Ramirez, Valentine is clearly marked as no ordinary book. Avoiding the graphic elements of the assault, Wetmore instead describes the aftermath through the small elements that allow this incredibly brave and vulnerable young woman to ground herself and survive the attack. The feeling of the sandy dirt, the view across the flat landscape, the sight of her own foot. These solid, objective elements let her know that she is still present, despite the disassociation that she may have experienced.

When Gloria shows up on the porch of Mary Rose’s ranch on the morning after Valentine’s Day, Mary Rose is far along in her pregnancy and has her own daughter to protect. And yet, Mary Rose is instantly one of the most captivating characters of the novel, noting that she should turn this unknown girl away to protect herself and her family—it’s what her husband would want her to do—and yet Mary Rose is no ordinary woman. She has a strength to fight back that she allowed to go dormant for so long.

As each chapter progresses, other women enter the narrative. There is Corrine, who has suffered her own hard times. And there is Debra Ann and Karla, who are young but not weak. Each woman (and girl) have their own story to tell. They all revolve around the toxic masculinity of the town they live in, and the women who stand up suffer some severe consequences. The unapologetic racism and sexism are prevalent in the town of Odessa, and I loved the way the chain of rebellion—beginning with Gloria merely surviving and then Mary Rose not allowing Goria’s attacker in the house—picked up momentum through the book. Each woman whose story intertwines with Goria’s makes the thread stronger, until there is power in the women pushing back against the much stronger patriarchy of the town of Odessa.

And yet there is the unavoidable heaviness to a story like this and sadness. This is not a fairy tale that Elizabeth Wetmore has crafted. This is a story that was so authentic feeling, that I actually forgot that it isn’t non-fiction. The descriptive language is captivating, and the narrative is woven together so delicately as if spun from glass. Beautiful, haunting, and unforgettable.

Thank you to the team at Harper Perennial for my copy. Opinions are my own.

About the Author

Before devoting herself to writing, Elizabeth variously tended bar, taught English, drove a cab, edited psychology dissertations, and painted silos and cooling towers at a petrochemical plant. For a time, she lived in a one-room cabin in the woods outside of Flagstaff, Arizona while she worked as a classical music announcer. A native of West Texas, she is most at home in the desert, near the sea, or on the side of a mountain. She lives in Chicago, but she dreams of being bicoastal (Lake Michigan and Lake Travis).

She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and 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. In addition, she was a Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf and a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. In the spring of 2015, she was one of six Writers in Residence at Hedgebrook.

Visit Elizabeth’s website and per-order your copy here or wherever your favorite place to buy books is. Valentine is on sale March 31, 2020.