Plano Reads: Join Second Tuesday Book Club August 10 for ‘Valentine’

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

“When I think back on that day, and finding Gloria Ramirez on my front porch, my memories are stitched together like pieces of a scrap quilt, each a different shape and color, all bound together by a thin, black ribbon, and I expect it will always be this way.”

Set in the oilfields outside Odessa, Texas, during the boom years of the1970s, Valentine is a first novel by Elizabeth Wetmore. A terrible crime on Valentine’s Day 1976 links teenager Gloria and Mary Rose, the young wife and mother she comes to for help, and sets in motion this thrilling and unsettling debut. Told from the perspectives of seven girls and women, Valentine gives us a compelling, unforgettable Texas story.

Writing in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Marion Winik comments, “Valentine evokes the physicality of the place with a visceral power…This literary landscape has been defined by men as surely as the reality it represents. Wetmore sweeps them to the sidelines, defiantly and confidently claiming West Texas for the women and girls … Valentine joins the best Texas novels ever written.”

Mary Helen Specht of The Texas Observer notes that “Elizabeth Wetmore’s debut novel, Valentine, is a revelation not for what it explores but how. She masterfully juggles the complex chronology of her structure—rich embedded flashbacks, surprising and satisfying flash-forwards. She describes the land with a gorgeous lyricism…and uses the concrete, physical world to develop her fascinating characters’ emotional lives.”

You can find Valentine in Plano Public Library in these formats: Print | Large Print |eBook | eAudiobook