"Valentine" by Elizabeth Wetmore

It took Elizabeth Wetmore 14 years to write her debut novel "Valentine." It wasn't that she was sitting at her desk every day at a loss for words. Life gets in the way of the work of an aspiring writer. She had to make a living and raise her son. But she also set the book aside for large chunks of time due to "lost nerve." The literary world is better for Wetmore's perseverance. "Valentine" is nothing short of remarkable.

I won't sugar coat it. The first chapter of "Valentine" is brutal as we are introduced to Gloria, a 14 year old Hispanic girl living in Odessa, Texas.

"Sunday morning begins out here in the oil patch, a few minutes before dawn, with a young roughneck stretched out and sleeping hard in his pickup truck...

Gloria Ramirez holds herself perfectly still, she is a downed mesquite branch, a half-buried stone, and she imagines him facedown in the dust, lips and cheeks scoured by sand, his thirst relieved only by the blood in his mouth...

She keep her eyes on the pickup truck and her fingers begin to press themselves lightly against the sand, counting one, two, three, four -- they are trying to keep her from making any sudden moves, to keep her quiet, to keep her among the living for another day. Because Gloria Ramirez might not know much on this morning, February 15, 1976, but she knows if he hadn't passed out before he sobered up enough to find his gun or get his hands around her throat, she would already be dead..."

Gloria does survive, literally dragging her beaten and bloodied body barefoot across the oil patch to a house in the distance. And so begins a story of the girls and women of Odessa whose lives intersect with that of Gloria, from the woman whose front porch she ended up on that morning to a recent widow who saw Gloria get into the truck with the roughneck to a young girl to whom Gloria is a cautionary tale.

Like Gloria, Wetmore grew up in Odessa. And while she left at 18, West Texas was where her mind went when she searched for inspiration. She went through old newspapers, looking for a different perspective than that of her own upbringing. She was struck by the violence of a place where oil ruled. With each boom, men descended upon the oil patch to make a quick buck. Crime rose, including assaults on women and girls of color.

In an interview at the Gaithersburg Book Festival, Wetmore said she "interrogated most deeply" whether the victim in the opening chapter of her book would be Latina or white. She realized that decision would yield two very different stories. Ultimately, she felt compelled by the "poison of racism" to make Gloria the linchpin of the story. (She noted that Odessa didn't desegregate its schools until under threat by the Justice Department in 1982.)

While the book opens and closes with Gloria, Wetmore's objective was to "give voice to the stories of women without a lot of resources and education." I was struck, if not surprised, by how young the women were when they became mothers. In one scene, an 18 year old Mary Jo and a 15 year old Ginny are expelled from school due to their pregnancies. These women, and their daughters, are just some of the characters we hear from in the book.

I developed a real soft spot for Ginny's daughter Debra Ann (D.A.) She's smart and kind and good-hearted but filled with a deep sadness since her mother recently up and drove away without her. D.A. befriends Jesse, a homeless veteran who's trying to make his way back into the world. They help each other, D.A. by providing Jesse with "borrowed" items from her home and those of her neighbors and Jesse by giving D.A. a purpose other than marking the days off on the calendar since her mother left.

In one short scene, D.A. sneaks into the widow's garage to take a frozen casserole from the freezer for Jesse. By all appearances, the coast was clear. But inside she finds Mrs. Shephard sitting quietly in her dead husband's running car. Corrine turns off the car to find out what D.A. wants. And while D.A. doesn't know what she has just prevented, we do.

"Valentine" is filled with almost throw away moments like this that devastated me. The cumulative effect is a powerful lens into a world I feel fortunate not to have experienced firsthand.

Read. This. Book.