Elizabeth Wetmore’s debut novel Valentine (2020) begins like a work of crime fiction. In the desolate West Texas oil town of Odessa, a drunk white teenage boy brutally beats and rapes a 14-year-old Mexican girl, yet the town’s racist and xenophobic residents turn on her, treating her as an outsider, and rush to defend the boy.

The story, however, evolves into a probing psychological examination of several women who live in the same Odessa neighborhood and—for different reasons and with different outcomes—rally to support the young girl, despite the town’s (and sometimes their own family’s) callous insensitivity, unapologetic racism, moral hypocrisy, and unexamined misogyny. An atmospheric piece, the novel uses the desolate and bleak countryside of West Texas as more a character than a setting. The chapters shift among the women’s perspectives, an ambitious structuring device that reflects the nearly 15 years Wetmore spent crafting the manuscript. Even before the novel’s release garnered critical appreciation and impressive sales, HBO optioned Valentine to develop into a limited series with producer Salma Hayek.

This study guide quotes and obscures the characters’ use of racial slurs, and it uses the HarperCollins first edition of the novel.

Plot Summary

Early in the morning on February 15, 1975, in a remote area of West Texas near Odessa, a very pregnant Mary Rose Whitehead awakens to pounding at the front door of her ranch. Her husband is off working the ranch, and Mary Rose hesitates to open the door. When she does, she finds a child, 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez. A Mexican immigrant, the girl is terrified and can barely speak. She’s bloody and has been beaten badly, her clothes ripped, and identifies her attacker as Dale Strickland, a white kid from Arkansas who works as an oil field hand. Mary Rose surmises that the girl has been sexually assaulted. Gloria tells Mary Rose that she fears Dale may be chasing her.

Outraged, Mary Rose helps the girl into her home. When Dale shows up, Mary Rose, armed with a rifle, fires a warning shot and prevents the agitated boy from talking to Gloria. She phones the police, and they arrest Dale. The arrest divides the town: Many in Odessa’s white community dismiss the charges as a young buck just letting off steam on a Valentine’s Day date that got out of control, while characterizing Gloria as a “loose” girl just asking for it. Gloria’s mother, Alma, is summarily deported back to Mexico, and because Mary Rose is a material witness to Gloria’s condition after the attack, when Gloria’s uncle moves her from the town to protect her from retaliation before the trial, Mary Rose emerges as the prosecution’s sole witness. Mary Rose starts receiving threatening phone messages. Alarmed, she asks her husband, who’s often away working the ranch, to let her move into town with their daughter, where she’ll feel safer.

In the Odessa neighborhood where she moves, Mary Rose meets retired schoolteacher Corrine Shepard, a widow struggling to adjust to life without her husband of 35 years. Corrine, who drinks way too much and floats through her days in self-induced indifference, comes to sympathize with Mary Rose. Corrine has forged a complicated relationship with a brash 11-year-old neighbor named Debra Ann Pierce (D.A. for short). D.A. grapples with the implications of her mother’s abandoning the family for no reason months earlier, although D.A. thinks her mother will return. As the summer begins and D.A. is out of school, she befriends a drifter, a Vietnam veteran named Jesse Belden, who came to Odessa looking for work. Jesse, who has PTSD and hearing loss from his tour of duty, is homeless and works at the local strip club. Until he can get home to Tennessee, he lives in a large drainpipe on the outskirts of Odessa. D.A. smuggles food and basic supplies to her new friend, and he’s grateful for the help; the two bond in their mutual loneliness. D.A. promises to help Jesse get his truck from his cousins so that he can return home.

Hiding out with her uncle in a motel about 30 miles from Odessa, Glory (she refuses to call herself Gloria) still endures aftereffects of the attack: She’s afraid to be alone, can’t sleep, picks at her food, and seldom leaves the hotel room except for a single afternoon when she seeks the cooling comfort of the hotel pool and shares her story with a woman she meets there.

When the trial begins and Glory doesn’t appear, the case hinges on Mary Rose’s testimony. She fumbles her appearance (ending up in jail for contempt of court), and the all-white jury convicts Dale on a lesser charge. Mary Rose is incensed over the verdict, and when she learns that D.A. and Jesse have left the neighborhood in Corrine’s pickup truck, she’s certain in her rage and confusion that Jesse is the newly released Dale and that he’s at it again. She grabs her rifle and heads out of town to track the two down. She corners Jesse and D.A. in nearby Penwell, where Jesse’s cousin has left his truck. Only the intervention of Corrine, who on a hunch followed her, prevents a delusional Mary Rose from shooting the innocent Jesse.

In the weeks after the trial, a drunken Dale makes the mistake of hitting on Karla Shipley, who works at an Odessa diner. Although no one can prove it, Karla appears to have run over Dale twice. Badly hurt, he recovers as Karla and her daughter head out of Odessa for a new life in San Antonio. Glory and her uncle leave Odessa to return to Mexico. The uncle comforts his niece with reassuring stories about the family that waits for them. As they cross the border home, Glory resolves never to look back.