The five wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade

Name of Book: The Five Wounds

Author: Kirstin Valdez Quade 

ISBN: 9781324020219

Publisher: W Norton 

Type of book: New Mexico, small village, community, hermadad, attempted entrepreneurship, generational trauma and poverty, different worlds, teenage motherhood, redemption, cancer diagnosis, relationships, goals, 

Year it was published: 2021

Summary:

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.

Characters:

Main characters are Amadeo, Angel and Yolanda. Amadeo is a 33 year old male who is about to become a grandfather. ( He was about eighteen when Angel was born.) He is well meaning and desires to do and be better, but quite often undealt with trauma and addiction mess up his intentions, causing him to do things he shouldn't be doing. He wants to stop being a mooch and leeching off his mom and hopes that he will be able to accomplish that goal. Angel is a sixteen year old girl who is pregnant, but at the same time she desires to be more than just a statistic and does what she can to be the best mom she can be. She is nurturing, a bit idealistic, and refuses to give up. Yolanda is Amadeos mom who has her own trauma to deal with, and is trying to spare everyone's feelings and well being in terms of her own secret. She is reluctantly supportive of Amadeo, having given up on him and works for a congresswoman. 

Theme:

It's important to have will and connections in order to survive 

Plot:

The story is in third person narrative from Amadeo's, Yolanda's, Angel's and to some extent Briana's points of view. The story begins on Holy Week, when Amadeo Padilla becomes jesus for a group of men. At the same time his teenage daughter Angel shows up pregnant, and unbeknownst to everyone else in the family, his beloved mother Yolanda finds out terrible news about herself. The rest of the tale focused a lot on just life, on familial ties between Amadeo and the women dominating his life as well as adjustments that everyone has to make when Angel gives birth to her son, Connor and when bad and good times rock the family. Seriously speaking, I cannot remember coming across another book like this one that portrays life so realistically with characters that portray a complex rainbow of personality traits, both bad and good. 

 
Author Information:
(From goodreads)

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds and Night at the Fiestas, winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She is the recipient of a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, the Rome Prize, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Originally from New Mexico, she now lives in New Jersey and teaches at Princeton University.

Opinion:

Lots of love towards this novel. While I love reading, i think one of my pet peeves when it comes to reading is lack of blue or no collar jobs, one where characters don't work at a fifty foot high office building and earn a million dollars. I am happy to report that i found a novel like that in Kirstin Valdez Quades The Five Wounds. Instead the characters live in a dying ( I think) small town community in New Mexico and aren't perfect but are trying as humanly as possible to be there for one another.  I think the biggest strengths of the novel are the characters and the setting which will definitely cause a lot of readers to root for them. 

This was given for review 

5 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)