Jul 25

Jul 25 The Five Wounds

Author: Kirstin Valdez Quade
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel about a New Mexican family’s extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.

It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.

Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn’t think he can live up to.

The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as “legitimate masterpieces” (New York Times). Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.

TL;DR Review

The Five Wounds is simultaneously big-hearted and unflinching, with characters who feel like they could literally step off the page. I really liked it.

For you if: You like character-driven novels — and flawed characters.

Full Review

“What no one appreciates is that it takes courage—and considerable dramatic flair—to show up and insist you belong, to invoke genetic claims and demand food and love and housing.”

If not for Roxane Gay’s Audacious book club on Literati, this book may have flown completely under my radar. I’m so glad that wasn’t the case. It’s been a while since I read a book with such vivid, flawed, tenderly written characters.

The novel, which grew out of a short story from Valdez Quade’s collection Night at the Fiestas, has three main characters: Amadeo, an unemployed alcoholic living with his mother and looking for a quick fix for his life; his fierce, strong, pregnant teenage daughter, Angel; and his mother, Yolanda, who’s carrying a very heavy secret. The story kicks off during holy week in New Mexico, when Amadeo is set to play a key role in the ceremonies with his uncle’s religious brotherhood, and Angel unexpectedly turns up on his (Yolanda’s) doorstep.

There are also so many vivid, incredible secondary and tertiary characters in this book, from Angel’s mother to her child’s father and more. I wish I had space to tell you about them all. A fourth POV character is introduced in part two, but I won’t spoil that because I had expected this person to be a much better, less selfish person than they turned out to be. In fact, that’s what makes these characters, and this book, so impressive — how many mistakes Valdez Quade allows her characters to make, how many bad things happen to and are brought about by them, and yet how tenderly they’re written, and how you grow to love them. Even Amadeo, whom I wanted to punch more than once, feels like that one family member you love because they’re family even though they’re also not a very good person.

I also switched back and forth between print and audio for this one, and the audiobook is really well done. The narrator played a big role in helping to bring these characters to life.

Anywho, this one’s for my character-driven literary fiction book fam. Add it to your TBR; give it a read or a listen.