A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!

Written with the haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout and Barbara Kingsolver, an astonishing debut novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s.

Mercy is hard in a place like this . . .

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 Ramirez 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.

Valentine is a haunting exploration of the intersections of violence and race, class and region in a story that plumbs the depths of darkness and fear, yet offers a window into beauty and hope. 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.

En un pueblo a trescientos kilometros de cualquier lugar, los destinos de un punado de personajes se entrelazan en una narracion magistral de odio y miedo, pero tambien de amor y de esperanza.

Es el dia de San Valentin del ano 1976 y el pueblo de Odessa, Texas, esta en la cuspide de un boom petrolero.

En medio del campo petrolifero, pocos minutos antes del amanecer, Glory Ramirez, de catorce anos, logra sacar fuerzas para escapar de su agresor. Atraviesa el campo entre alambres de puas, restos de tuberias rotas y matojos de mezquite hasta llegar a la puerta de Mary Rose Whitehead, cuya vida se ve irremediablemente trastocada no solo por la crueldad de la que ha sido victima la nina -bien podria ser su hija- sino por los hechos subsecuentes, que se suman a los relatos de violencia e injusticia cotidianas que por generaciones han sufrido las mujeres de su pueblo.

Mas alla de describir el contexto historico de un pueblo sureno, Elizabeth Wetmore nos ofrece un potente debut literario que explora los limites del ser humano. Una novela coral extraordinariamente escrita que nos lleva por las entranas de las mujeres que la protagonizan.

Nacida y criada en West Texas, Elizabeth Wetmore vive con su esposo y su hijo en Chicago. Amor y furia es su primera novela.