Will I love Valentine?

Valentine handles some very heavy topics beautifully.

Many of the characters are connected by only one thread: they are women trying to survive in West Texas in the early 1970s. It centers around a brutal incident and the quest to find justice for a Mexican teenage girl who was violently assaulted.

Throughout the story we get such an intimate look at these women’s lives. I felt like I knew them. I felt like I was sitting right next to them in their kitchen or on their front porch.

These women were all hardened by the trials life had thrown at… show more.

I am drawn to books about strong women fighting against social norms and the society that limits them. Elizabeth Wetmore’s, Valentine, shows us how challenging this fight can be, how frightening, and how it requires choices some women aren’t willing to make. In 1976, in a small town in Texas, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramirez is violently attacked. When she drags herself to Mary Rose’s front porch, her story forces the women in Odessa to confront their own brutal experiences. Told from multiple perspectives, Whitmore’s skillful, raw prose draws us into the lives of each woman, leaving us wondering what it… show more.