Valentine, Elizabeth Wetmore
Valentine was given to me by one of my closest friends (shout out to Allie!) for my birthday, and is set in Texas’s oil boom in the 1970s. Each chapter of the book features the perspective of one of the women of Odessa, a town full of rig workers and their families. When a 14-year-old girl, badly beaten and raped, shows up on the front porch of one of the women, and the woman decides to testify in court on her behalf, it changes the lives of not only both of them, but of various women throughout the town, all connected through intricate social class connections and town gossip. What I liked most about this book was that it portrayed a group of women who, although not friends, decided to support each other and decry the treatment that women suffer at the hands of men, all too often. #BelieveWomen in an era when hash tags weren’t a thing and sexism was something that was supposed to be born in silence. Valentine shows the work of women behind the scenes and showcases our strength and power, as well as our vulnerability, in the face of difficulty.
Eveless Eden, Marianne Wiggins
Taking place in London, Cameroon, and Romania in the 1990s, Eveless Eden tells the story of a journalist who falls in love with a photographer who ghosts him (before ghosting was a thing) and leaves him heartbroken. The next time he sees her, he commits a horrific crime, which, although he recognizes as the ‘worst thing he’s ever done’ seems to be in some way comparable to her ghosting him, tit for tat, and she somehow ends up turning to him for help at the end of the novel. This is not only simply unbelievable, in the worst sense of the word, but also enormously far-fetched. (I wouldn’t be asking someone who raped me for help, is all I’m saying.) In addition, the narrator is unlikeable to the extreme, and I doubt most readers would even find him interesting. This book was long-listed for the Women’s Prize, and goes along with my theory that they didn’t really know what they were doing in the beginning. At least their choices got better as the years went by!