Book Blurb:
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.
My Review: 5 stars
Valentine may be one of the most haunting and memorable books I’ve read in some time. It packs a huge punch yet is unnervingly hard to describe the plot. Honestly, sharing that a book is about a young girl that is brutally raped and the aftermath that follows, really wouldn’t make me run out to read it. I’m here to negate those thoughts. This is a book full of grit and hardship, love and kindness, justice and vengeance.
This story is told in alternating points of view by different women in the town. Each one made my heart ache as all of them lived a rough existence in a place where women were second class citizens. Although the spark for the plot is the rape, this is the perfect example of a character driven book. Complicated, marginalized and lonely women who wanted more for themselves and their daughters are stricken after Glory’s rape. Their coping mechanisms are vast: protection mode, despair, disappearance, befriending, moving, racist innuendo, drinking and avoidance are all at play.
Odessa, Texas is its own character. The land has beat up the townspeople with its reliance on weather, oil and cows. The land can provide, but when it can’t, well, it turns people into their worst selves. It breeds a continued chain of bigotry, blame, chauvinism and anger. Because of the rich descriptions, I learned many new words about land and nature: screwworms, pumpjack, caliche, silage, bobwhite and kestrels.
There is parallel story about a young girl who befriends a young man, sent home from military service. Their relationship was one that kept you on edge as its innocence could turn ugly at any moment. The goodness and purity of this girl wanting to help someone else was a reminder that kids are born without prejudices or predilections. It’s a learned behavior – one ever present in Odessa.
I still can’t believe this was a debut novel. The writing was evocative and descriptive. No sentence went to waste. It brought this story to live. Kudos!
Quotes I liked:
She thinks how nice it is when somebody saves you from something, even if you don’t need to be saved.”
“He should have outlived me, she thinks. He was so much better at life.”
“Several tumbleweeds rest against the sliding glass door as if they knocked for a long time, and finally gave up.”
“… Judge Rice pulls a pistol out from under his robe and sets it one his desk. West Texan gavel, he tells all of us.”
“The only thing I hate more than being home with Alice all day long is feeling guilty about not wanting to do it.”
“It was the best thing about being an old lady with thinning hair and boobs saggy enough to prop up on a bar. Finally, she could sit down on a barstool and drink yourself blind without some jackass hassling her.”
“The church I grew up in taught us that sin, even if it happens only in your heart, condemns you all the same. Grace is not assured to any of us, maybe not even most of us, and while being saved gives you a fighting chance, you must always hope that the sin lodged in your heart, like a bullet that cannot be removed without killing you, is not of the mortal kind.”
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