VALENTINE

A 'To Kill a Mockingbird' tale set in West Texas - Valentine, the debut novel from West Texas author Elizabeth Wetmore, is both dream and nightmare at the same time ... Valentine feels like a flower growing out of pavement ... It's an incredibly moving and emotionally devastating piece of work that heralds great things from Wetmore. There's nothing in the pages but the world we Texans have built. If the mirror makes you uncomfortable, well, change the person in it. Read more...

UK: Fourth Estate ; Dutch: Atlas Contact ; French: Les Escales ; Korean: Sigongsa

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.

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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. Read more...

Drawing comparisons to Barbara Kingsolver and Wallace Stegner, Wetmore writes with an evidently innate wisdom about the human spirit. With deep introspection, she expertly unravels the complexities between men, women, and the land they inhabit. Achingly powerful ...

... a monument to a sort of singular grace, and true grit. Read more...

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 quarterland, 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.

Wetmore's characters offer perspectives that cross generations, socioeconomic classes and races. Yet all characters serve to showcase the resilience of women and the power that comes in deciding the direction of one's own story.

"Elizabeth Wetmore shows us the vivid and complex culture of Odessa, Texas. The women in this book move through their difficult lives with strength and surprising grace. The landscape and characters are rendered with precise and lyric prose. Valentine is a beautiful book written with compassion, understanding, and deep honesty. A remarkable debut."

In outstanding prose, Wetmore has created a handful of extraordinary women out of the dust of West Texas, 1976. They are all so real, with their hard lives lived with absolute humanity. Valentine is both heartbreaking and thrilling, I loved it.

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.

As these women navigate what is decidedly a man's world with feminine grace, Valentine becomes 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. Read more...

Stirring ... Wetmore poetically weaves the landscape of Odessa and the internal lives of her characters, whose presence remains vivid after the last page is turned. This moving portrait of West Texas oil country evokes the work of Larry McMurtry and John Sayles with strong, memorable female voices.

It is nearly impossible for me to believe that Elizabeth Wetmore is a first time novelist. How can a writer burst out of the gate with this much firepower and skill? VALENTINE is brilliant, sharp, tightly-wound, and devastating. Wetmore has ripped the brutal, epic landscape of West Texas out of the hands of men, and las handed the stories over (finally!) to the girls and women who have always suffered, survived, and made their mark in such a hostile world. These are some of the most fully-realized and unforgettable female characters I've ever met. They will stay with me.

Told from the point of view of the women who usually take a back seat in historical Texas fiction, Valentine gives us what we didn't know we were missing. Female anger, check. Female vengeance, check. An all-female car chase? Hell yes! There is a narratively important gun named Old Lady, and that is really all you need to know. In this novel, violence is not solely the purview of the men ... Go out and buy this book. Make it the success it deserves to be. Read more...

Fierce and complex, VALENTINE is a novel of moral urgency and breathtaking prose. This is the very definition of a stunning debut.

"Valentine" is an angry novel, a blast of feminist outrage against a toxic culture that breeds racism and violence against women. The narrative hurtles forward with urgency of a thriller, and it emulates the darkest spy fiction by making it painfully apparent that the good guys are at least as likely as the bad guys to be punished. Elizabeth Wetmore's mingled love and fury for her native West Texas electrifies her prose; despite its grim subject matter, her first novel is exhilarating to read, because the characters are so alive, the drama that engages them so compelling. Read more...

All this white-hot fury is brilliantly captured in a climactic dust storm that the author must have written in a fever pitch.

With most bookstores closed and our attention fixated on the epidemiological and financial disasters ravaging [the World], now seems like the worst possible moment to release a debut novel. But Wetmore has written something thrilling and thoughtful. Don't let the launch of this novelist's career be drowned out. Someday book clubs will meet again, and this would be a rousing choice. Read more...

I needed to miss it, to fall in love with my hometown enough to be able to write about it. That took a long time - many years - and when I did, it was by first falling in love with land and that epic sky ... Stories are everywhere, and absolutely inescapable. And of course, because writing is all about heart, I have also been instructed in my writing by those who held my heart, for a time, or broke itand those whose hearts I held, or broke. Read more...

Each of these women is up against inequalities and injustices, and Wetmore treats their struggles with the gravitas they deserve ... Wetmore's delight in language enlivens every page. Her similes would give Raymond Chandler a run for his money ... Read more...