VALENTINE

The brutal rape of a Mexican American teenager on Valentine’s Day and its traumatic aftereffects on several Anglo women in 1970s small-town West Texas drive Wetmore’s searing, propulsive debut.

It’s Feb. 15, 1976, and Odessa, Texas, sitting on the oil-rich Permian Basin, is on the brink of another boom that will attract both prosperity and violence, especially against women. A cafe owner warns her waitresses: “Keep your eyes peeled for the next serial killer.” In a gritty oil town where casual misogyny and racism rule supreme, women’s lives are cheap. But 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez, raped and badly beaten by young roughneck Dale Strickland, who had picked her up at the Sonic drive-in, refuses to become another nameless victim. While her attacker lies passed out in his truck, Glory, as she renames herself, flees barefoot across the barren oil patch to Mary Rose Whitehead’s farmhouse. Her knock on the door changes both their lives. Shocked at the brutality of the crime and frightened by her confrontation with Strickland, who'd followed Glory to her house, the pregnant Mary Rose, who will testify at the upcoming trial, moves into town with her 9-year-old daughter, Aimee Jo. With her husband staying at the ranch, she is further unnerved by threatening phone calls. Her neighbor on Larkspur Lane, retired teacher Corrine Shepard, mourns her late husband by drinking too much and fending off the overtures of lonely 10-year-old Debra Ann Pierce, who longs for the return of her runaway mother, Ginny. Glory holes up in a motel with her uncle; an encounter at the pool sets her on the path to healing. Through these alternating narratives, Wetmore tells a powerful story of female anger, a repressed rage against systematic sexism and racism ready to explode in a “surface blowout.” Glory hopes her rapist “dies young.” Mary Rose’s seething indignation lands her in a holding cell. All this white-hot fury is brilliantly captured in a climactic dust storm that the author must have written in a fever pitch.  

From its chilling opening to its haunting conclusion, this astonishing novel will resonate with many readers.