Valentine, by Elizabeth Wetmore
“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.”
From the book jacket:
“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 Ramirez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive, after a vicious attack in a nearby oil field. This act of brutality 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 alternatiing points of view of indelible characters who burrow deep into 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.”
“In a good year, there might be two or three of them – the outcasts and weirdoes, the cellists and geniuses and acne-ridden tuba players, the poets, the boys whose asthma precluded a high school football career and the girls who hadn’t learned to hide their smarts. Stories save lives, Corrine said to those students. To the rest of them she said, I’ll wake you when it’s over.”
My thoughts
Set in the dusty West Texas town of Odessa in 1976, Valentine explores the events surrounding a sexual assault of a Mexican-American teenage girl named Gloria. The story is told from varying viewpoints of women in the town, ranging from Gloria herself, to the woman who helped her get away, to a motherless child, to an aging widow with a sharp tongue and a drinking problem (my favorite character). It’s sad, it’s blunt, and it’s so devastatingly real.
Wetmore has an amazing way with language. She paints vivid pictures with sparse words, and her choice to exclude quotation marks is an unusual but moving one. It brings the reader deeper into each narrator’s mind, allowing us to be absorbed into the pain and beauty of the story.
“Shit, I got my first cheerleading outfit when I was still in diapers. All of us did. If we were lucky, we made it to twelve before some man or boy, or well-intentioned woman who just thought we ought to know the score, let us know why we were put on this earth. To cheer them on.”
The narrative addresses cultural racism and sexism in a stark and brutal way, highlighting the structural and societal prejudices that so often stand in the way of justice. Not only are readers forced to face the harsh reality of assault and the unfair biases that follow victims; the novel explores how women are victimized as a whole.
In a small, dead-end drilling town like Odessa in the ’70s, several of the point-of-view characters are trapped in a cycle of pregnancy and early marriage. All of the narrating characters experience a feeling of helplessness and victimhood in their own ways.
It’s a powerful story of resiliency and strength in the face of bleak and uniform gloom.
“Our great-granddaddies drove men from their beds with bullwhips and fire, dragged children out of beds by their feet and made them watch their mamas being pulled into the fields by their hair. Some of our daddies and brothers still keep a bullwhip under the front seat. Our great-grandmothers feigned frailty until it was stitched to their hearts. Some of us still do the same. To speak up would require courage that we cannot even begin to imagine.”
Especially in this time of cultural upheaval and reckoning, this book spoke to me. I felt both empowered and called-out; as a woman, I relate to the pent-up fury over injustice while at the same time being conditioned to look the other way when other groups are mistreated and marginalized.
Valentine suggests the power we can have when we band together, when we recognize our sisterhood as women and our fellowship as human beings.
Even in the face of the inhuman brutality of the world, we can afford to be tender, to be human, and to never give up on love.
My rating
Overall rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Read if you like: fast, immersive reads; feminist lit; strong female leads
Trigger warning: sexual assault, suicide, alcoholism
