Summary and Reviews of Outside Valentine by Liza Ward

Outside Valentine by Liza Ward

Outside Valentine

by Liza Ward
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Readers' Rating (3):
  • First Published:
  • Sep 1, 2004, 320 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2005, 320 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Every so often a novel comes along that is capable of redeeming the losses it so devastatingly conveys. Disturbing, bittersweet, and lyrical, this is a story of people torn apart by tragedy and yet, finally, transformed by love.

A debut novelist interweaves a trio of voices-haunting, dangerous, full of longing--mysteriously linked by a shocking crime and the search to heal the past

Many long years have passed since the winter of blinding white when Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate drove across the hushed midwestern landscape and left a trail of blood and pain. So why does Lowell, a Manhattan collector of antiquities, still dream of what happened, despite his wife's best attempts to draw him back and offer comfort? And who is Susan, the teenager who appoints herself a detective, piecing together the story of the murders while wondering if she'll ever be loved like Starkweather loved his girl?

And then there's Caril Ann herself, who takes us back to relive the ride she swears she could not control. It began on the day Charlie first saw her, dangling her bare legs off the edge of a tree house. It ended outside Valentine, Nebraska, on that night when she still believed that life could somehow go back to being normal . . .

Every so often a novel comes along that is capable of redeeming the losses it so devastatingly conveys. Disturbing, bittersweet, and lyrical, Liza Ward's Outside Valentine is a story of people torn apart by tragedy and yet, finally, transformed by love.

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Reviews

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Outside Valentine is an elegantly written and compelling book in its own right, but the story is given an extra edge by the fact that the author's paternal grandparents were two of the victims, and one of the fictionalized characters in the book is, apparently, based on the author's own father...continued

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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).

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Beyond the Book



Outside Valentine is an elegantly written and compelling first novel in its own right, but the story is given an extra edge by the fact that the author's paternal grandparents were two of the victims, and one of the fictionalized characters in the book is, apparently, based on the author's father.  

The Starweather/Fugate killings were the inspiration for a number of movies such as Terrence Malick's Badlands (1974), Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), and ...

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Read-Alikes

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