Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Not a bad read. For me it was an ok read. Thank you to both the publishers and NetGalley for gifting me the book

Thank you for providing me with an advance review copy of this book. Enjoyed reading, would recommend....

It was a very depressing read. Even given the heavy topics I don’t think I was expecting things to be so hopeless. And the poetic language had my thoughts wandering, meaning I had to read passages again. It just wasn’t for me.

I didn't finish this book. Unrelenting misery set in West Texas where I myself experienced a year of misery apart from the birth of our son.
Writing was good enough, but just too depressing to be reminded of that time.

Valentine is a heartbreaking, gutting novel set in 1970s Texas and it's centered around the violent attack on a young Mexican girl called Gloria that divides a town - while some call it a "lover's spat" and question why one of their boys is in trouble because of a "misunderstanding", Mary Rose tells it as she saw it when the girl arrived at the front door on Valentine's day; this was no lover's spat. It was rape.

I find books that tackle rape and especially about victims not being believed really hard to read, and this was no exception - hence my very long delay in picking up this eARC. If you have triggers, please check my last line of this review, where I've listed all the triggers I identified in this book. Elizabeth Wetmore treats the themes of this book with respect and sensibility but does not shy away from the horrors of them and I found it emotionally difficult to go through. In terms of theme and the kind of feelings this gave me, Valentine reminded me a lot of Kept Animals by Kate Milliken in terms of the writing, the darker tone (although Kept Animals is a Sapphic coming-of-age story), the setting and a bit of the theme.

The main selling point of this book for me was its setting: Texas in the 70s was experiencing an oil boom and hoped for progress and opportunity. I haven't read many books with this setting and it really interested me - otherwise I normally don't gravitate towards books that I know will be so bleak.

In the end, the book's choice of having several narrators, and so several storylines to follow, made it drag on for what felt like forever. I was constantly torn between "this is such a great book" and "I'm exhausted". The bleakness of the main theme, as well as the result of the rapist's trial being something the reader expects already makes the inevitability of it feel even heavier. It probably did not help I had been quite depressed when reading this. On the one hand, it's a very realistic story; on the other, I'm so tired of it. In its heart, Valentine is a story about female anger. It tries (and mostly succeeds) in also being about racism and xenophobia, too, but mostly it revolved around violence against women, especially when we consider that Glory/Gloria got a lot fewer chapters than Mary Rose. I wavered between 3 and 4 stars, because this is such a beautifully written book with something quite special about it, both heartbreaking and deeply human, but in the end the "dragging on" feel was overpowering - it felt to me that the story would have been stronger if one or two narrators had been thrown out.

Without spoiling the end, I would say there is something about it that made this book go from being categorized in my mind as "a bleak story about a girl being brutalized and never seeing justice" to "one of these books inspired by the #MeToo movement about female rage". To me, those are very different categories and I'm a lot more interested in the second, which is why in the end I was glad to have read it. If you are looking to read a book on female rage that leans heavily on revenge fantasy, pick up They Never Learn by Layne Fargo instead, because Valentine is rather among those realistic stories, in the line of My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell.

Trigger warnings: rape of underage victim, victim not believed, racism, xenophobia, misogyny.

Unfortunately I struggled to get past the violent rape at the beginning. I couldn’t call this entertaining.

Odessa, Texas, 1976. A shale-oil town run by men and served by women and neither are content.

The novel is told from the perspective of the female characters; centring mainly on 3:
* Gloria (Gloria( a 14-year-old Mexican immigrant brutally raped by Dale Strickland a 25 year old oil man having climbed into his truck of her own volition on the evening of Valentine's day;
*Mary Rose who, heavily pregnant and marooned on her property day-in day-out with her young daughter, opens her door to the tattered figure of Gloria after she's walked 3 miles to escape her sleeping attacker;
*Corrine Shepherd, Odessa's answer to Olive Kitteridge. Widowed and grappling with persistent thoughts of suicide, she has seen the rise and fall of her hometown with the discovery of oil and the resulting wealth, greed and ugliness.

Wetmore's writing shimmers. Shot through with glittering description, she invites the reader to, not only mourn the shattered lives of her characters, but also the bleeding out of all that is good in Odessa with the relentless thrumming thirst of the pump-jacks. Indeed, I was so captivated by her writing style that I was some way through the novel before I realised I hadn't paused to make my usual notes to add to my review. But, you will see.

My thanks to netgalley, the author and publisher for sharing an advance copy with me in return for my honest opinion.

This is a tough read, life is hard for women and migrants and especially Mexican immigrant women in 1976 Texas. The opening pages will shock and grip you, making the rest of the book unmissable. The women of Odessa each have a story to tell and nothing is glossed over, all of the relentless, downtrodden, subservient way of life is held out for inspection. It is very well-written, but very bleak. There is hope but totally found in the brave spirits of the women.

Great debut novel. Lots of character and action that is set in West Texas. Tells the story of how women negotiate a mans world.

This is an outstanding novel. The writing is beautiful & each voice totally unique. Exploring the aftermath of a brutal rape against a 14 year old Mexican girl in a small Texas town in the 1970's, this novel is gripping, timely and devastating. I'll be telling everyone I know to read it!

A 14 Mexican girl, Gloria (later Glory) is brutally raped in an oilfield town in Texas after getting into a car with a 25 year old man. After the attack she manages to make it to a neighbour's house who defends her when her rapist shows up. The town then splinters into those who side with the attacker and those who side with Glory. This book explores the themes of race, sexual assault and challenged my own prejudices. I found it so hard to get over the fact that Glory had got into the car willingly and of her own accord and was forced to reflect on the fact that we so often victim blame as a way of making ourselves feel safer, thinking "oh I would never do that". The writing is spare and evocative, you really get a sense of the dirt and the ugliness of Odessa and how limited the options are for women. The racism is all the more shocking for being so causally dealt with. In a strange way this book reminded me of To kill a Mockingbird, only in this book the positions are reversed, the accused is definitely guilty but it is still the same endemic racism that is at play.

"Are we guilty? We are guilty as sin, guilty as the day is long."

A beautifully written novel with characters that will stay with me for a long time after I've finished the last page. Set in Texas in the 1970s, centered around the attack and rape of a young Mexican girl, this novel weaves together female characters and their storylines in a heartbreaking and beautiful way.

Thank you #Netgalley and Fourth Estate publishers for the ARC.

With echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird the story is about the rape of a Mexican girl by a Texan man. We follow the people of a small town in the middle of the Texas oilfields and the trial which ensues.
I liked the different versions of the story told by various inhabitants, but I found the lack of speech marks made sometimes difficult reading. This seems to be a fashion in novels recently and in my opinion does nothing to enhance the experience.
The writing is very atmospheric though and I could almost smell the sulphurous odour of the oil wells.

Really enjoyed reading this. An thoughtful, tight read. The violence that is all present is never gratuitous. A great new talent!

Set in Odessa, West Texas, in 1976, Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore starts off with a teenage girl surviving an extremely violent act on the first few pages. Throughout the rest of the book we discover the fall out of this event, told through the voices of different women in the town. I was gripped by this debut novel and the evocative writing transported me into the dusty, hot, gritty, and hostile world of an oil boom town in the middle of a desert world. When I read this I was impressed and completely absorbed, and now, a few weeks later, the women and their love and hate, prejudice and passion, are still on my mind.

Set in the grime of the Texas oilfields in the 1970's this story pulls no punches. it starts with the rape of a 14 year old girl who escapes whilst her rapist sleeps. She finds support and the young man is arrested. So far, so ordinary you might think. But it is the impact of this crime on the small town of Odessa that forms the real story. Wetmore is an exceptionally gifted writer who uses this setting to draw us in to the male-dominated, lonely, emotionally impoverished world that is Odessa. In this dismal environment of oilfields, dirt and dust people find comfort where they can. Interactions are unpredictable and, on occasion, lead to dreadful outcomes. What makes this novel stand out is how the numerous storylines interweave to give the reader an utterly believable series of cameos which one would like to believe could only ever happen in somewhere as bleak as Odessa . But regrettably, by the end of the book, we realise we are looking at an allegory for the unpredictability of human interaction. Yes, we've come a long way from Odessa and the 1970's but how far has human understanding come? A thought provoking read..

This was a really beautiful book with a really heartbreaking story at its core.
The writing style is stunning and the way the stories unfold in each chapter had me hooked. I love that each chapter was written from a different character and they were really fully thought out with meaningful stories.
I particularly loved the lyrical descriptions of the landscape of the town and beyond.
The only downside was the story did tend to drift off on a tangent and this slowed the pace a little bit.
Highly enjoyable read which I will be recommending for sure.

I really liked this book – it was not particularly pleasant reading. Afterall, no book that starts with the traumatic aftermath of a violent rape, can ever be considered a pleasant read. Thankfully, the actual rape was not described – only the aftermath. But the characters are compelling, and their stories of how each person tries to move on from that fateful night – from the rape and from other adverse changes in their lives.
The book is told mainly in the third person, and from a variety of points of view. The only exception is the chapters narrated by Mary Rose – the lady who comes to the aid of the young raped girl, Glory. The subjects of each chapter are the females, of all ages, who inhabit the godforsaken Texas shale oil town. The date 1976. I really hope attitudes and times have changed drastically since then. If not, then my only advice to any female considering going there, is DON’T. And to any female unfortunate enough to be there, GET OUT. NOW!!!
The town is a man’s world. Women are there to smile, do what their menfolk say, produce babies, and never rock the boat. A few escape, some try to improve their lot within the tight constraints, most get ground down. The men of the town die in accidents at work, or when drunk.
“And the women, how do we lose them? Usually, it’s when one of the men kills them”
The men are not all bad (except Dale Strickland, who is downright evil). It just never occurs to them, that the women of the town might need more, that they may want in order to live rather than just exist for the benefit of the men. Only Corrine’s husband, Potter, ever thought to ask. Likewise, the women are not all sympathetic. But it is clear what has made them into the people that they are. Some, like Debra Ann, start out annoying, and then grow on you. My favourite character was Corrine – the only woman in the book who managed to complete her education. I was reading about her mourning the recent death of Potter, who had terminal cancer – on the day that I heard that my own husband’s chemotherapy had failed. And I wondered if that would be me in a few months’ time. Corrine starts the book desolate, annoyed by everything and everyone, but slowly finds a reason to go on living.
Apart from the rampant misogyny, the town is also cursed with unrelenting racism. That the racism only seems directed at Mexicans, is probably because other minorities are lucky enough to not have to go anywhere near the town, so are outside the locals’ attention and vitriol.
A young girl is viciously raped and many of the townsfolk see the rapist as the victim – some no-account girl of questionable morals (i.e. Mexican) trying to destroy the reputation of this fine upstanding (i.e. white) boy.
“Fourteen years old. As if there might have been some moral ambiguity, Corrine thinks bitterly, if Gloria Ramírez had been sixteen, or white”
I do like that while the book depicts Glory as being wilful, an occasional shoplifter and not listening to her mother, it does not discuss any previous sexual activity (or its absence). Clearly, she got willingly into Strickland’s truck, but there is no mention of consent to sex with him. Consent is in any case immaterial, since a) she is well under age b) she made it abundantly clear that she wished the sex to stop and c) no-one consents to such grievous bodily harm as a ruptured spleen.
I finished this book nearly a month ago, but have not been in the right frame of mind to review it until now. Luckily, it is the type of book whose tale and characters remain with you long after the book is read. As I checked back on some of the notes I had made, I found myself sucked in again and rereading whole chapters of the book – just as good on the second reading as on the first. Although the book has received mixed reviews, I personally highly recommend this book.

A great, tense thriller that intensifies as you go from one chapter to the next - a look at the 'stereotypes' of sexual assault, especially when the assailant is Caucasian and the victim is not. A really well plotted and executed novel! Full review to come.

Set in Odessa, Texas in 1976 the story of the aftermath of the brutal rape of a 14 year old girl is told via the perspective of various women and girls. The geographical environment is extremely hostile and, despite a fragile veneer of churchgoing respectability, sexism and racism are part of everyday life. Teenage pregnancies are rife and the Pastor preaches against desegregation.

In a quietly understated narrative Elizabeth Wetmore describes the connections between the characters, their daily challenges, their aspirations and the small victories that can occasionally be achieved.

A powerful debut novel.

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins 4th Estate for a copy to review.