VALENTINE by Elizabeth Wetmore

The title sounds like a romance novel; however, this is anything but.  Nor is it a love letter to Odessa, Texas, where it takes place in the 1970s.  A local oil worker, Dale Strickland, rapes and beats up a 14-year-old Latina girl, Gloria, who escapes to a nearby farmhouse.  The woman who lives there, Mary Rose, is the star of this novel and the star witness at Dale’s trial, since the young traumatized victim refuses to testify.  All of the other characters, except a homeless man, are Mary Rose’s female neighbors and their daughters.  (Casseroles are passed around to the point that I could not keep up with where they originated nor who finally ate them.)   There are a few editorial mistakes that annoyed me (“just desserts” should be “just deserts”) but I still appreciated the themes this novel so admirably addresses—justice, bigotry, power, courage, and cowardice.  The plot is not entirely original:  the town blames the victim and rallies around the smug attacker because he is the son of a local preacher.  Even Mary Rose’s husband tries to discourage her from rocking the boat.  However, feisty Mary Rose sticks to her guns, almost literally, as she and her daughter perform hours of target practice each day, just in case one of her many telephone harassers actually shows up in person on her doorstep.  Corinne, a neighbor whose husband, Potter, has killed himself rather than finally succumb to cancer, is completely lost and drinking herself into any early grave so that she can join her husband.  Potter was a tortured soul, suffering physically obviously but also blaming himself for not intervening when he and Corinne saw Gloria hop into Dale’s truck.  Despite the really bleak plot, the book is not humorless.  Ten-year-old Debra Ann, D.A. for short,  has eschewed her imaginary friends for the real Jesse, who is living in an appliance carton.  She steals supplies for him from her neighbors’ unlocked homes, and those women commiserate about how they must be losing their minds, given how many household items they’ve apparently misplaced.  Ultimately, Mary Rose’s righteous indignation almost leads to her undoing, but the Odessa women bring light to one another’s darkness.