Intended Audience
Trade
Reviews
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 debut. You'll wish you had more time with each of these powerful women when it's over., In Valentine, Elizabeth Wetmore cracks open West Texas and lays bare what beats inside: a world at once ferocious, fragile, and furious, where women and girls fight menace from every fanged quarter--land, animal, human. But fight they do, for themselves, for each other, for what's right. Wondrously, amid the sorrow, Valentine thrums with the most staggering beauty, a compassion and tenderness as vast as the sky. You'll read this book like a letter from a lost love, clutched in your hands, heart in your throat. You'll carry it with you forever., My goodness, what a novel. I clutched this book in both hands and by the end I could feel the dust of West Texas on my skin. Elizabeth Wetmore understands the nuances of the human heart better than almost any writer I've read in recent years, and I rooted for these women with everything I have. There is violence here, and despair, but in the end the story is a testament to quiet courage, to hope, to love. Every person should read this extraordinary debut., Valentine is a screaming flare shot into the night sky: a blazing debut that's as tender and subversive as it is powerful. From the opening moment, I could not look away; the characters are so complex, so gritty and determined, that I had the sense they were carrying me aloft, that they wouldn't release me until we were safe. Elizabeth Wetmore captures a place and story that's both expansive and suffocating, counterfeit and raw, brutal and beautiful, all the vivid contradictions. Wetmore is a new literary powerhouse, and Valentine is quite simply one of the best books I've ever read., 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.
Dewey Edition
23
CLASSIFICATION_METADATA
{"IsNonfiction":["No"],"IsOther":["No"],"IsAdult":["No"],"MuzeFormatDesc":["Hardcover"],"IsChildren":["No"],"Genre":["FICTION"],"Topic":["Coming of Age","Thrillers / Legal","Historical","Small Town & Rural","Legal"],"IsTextBook":["Yes"],"IsFiction":["Yes"]}
Dewey Decimal
813.6
Synopsis
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., 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. 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 Ram rez 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, one of the town's women decides to take matters into her own hands, setting the stage 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, darkly funny, 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.
ebay_catalog_id
4
