I hadn’t even heard of this book when I was assigned it for my BookTube Prize reading. But I’m glad it was brought to my attention, and that I had a chance to give it a try. It’s not the kind of book I’ve been gravitating towards lately, either. It’s a family story, for starters. The intricacies of family drama often exhaust me with little payoff. The last one I read voluntarily was Ask Again, Yes, and I didn’t love it. This story is about the Padillas, a Latin-American family who live in a small town in New Mexico. We meet Amadeo first. He is a lifelong mess. In his mid-thirties, he has yet to find a job he can stick with, is completely dependent on his mother and is estranged from his ex and his teenaged daughter. He is assigned the role of Jesus in a religious procession, and has come to view this as not only an opportunity to participate in his religious community, but to redeem himself and start a new, more respectable and industrious life.
One day he comes home from a religious meeting to find his teenaged daughter sitting outside his house, pregnant. She has had a disagreement with her stepfather and moved out of her mother’s house. Amadeo can’t even take care of himself, so this sudden arrival isn’t exactly a welcome surprise. Angel, his daughter, has her own set of worries, starting (obviously) with her pregnancy. She’s enrolled in a program for young mothers and expectant mothers, and has a strong desire to do well in the course and prove that she can, against all odds, become a proper mother. But she’s very much a teenager, and not just that, she’s an “at risk” teen – her parents are divorced, her family has a history of addiction and unemployment and she lacks a strong support system. She has become fixated on her teacher as the maternal figure she so desperately needs, whether or not the teacher is aware of this. Her relationships are messy and so are most of the people in her life. Moving in with her drunken father isn’t where she wants to be, but she’s determined to make the best of it.
Meanwhile Amadeo’s mother is struggling to come to terms with a recent health issue and is on a road trip in Nevada with a short-term boyfriend and trying to make her way home. Due to her situation, she’s also looking back over her life, and revisiting the pain of her husband’s addiction and untimely death, and the many secrets she’s had to carry.
Each character has a lot of past trauma, and a lot of weighty problems to face: unemployment, addiction, parenthood, relationships, illness, and even death. Each is struggling under the weight of these problems, and looking for any help they can get. It would be easy to give up on them, but as we get to know them, we see that despite all the mistakes they’ve made, each is trying, against the odds, to find a way to be better: better parents, better friends, better children. And each really loves their family, and wants to learn how to be what they need.
These three are the main characters in this saga, but their stories are representative of the experiences of many. They are a microcosm for the issues faced by Americans who are not rich, white, educated, employed and upwardly mobile. They lack privilege, but they somehow seem to have inextinguishable hope, despite all the strikes against them. As our story progresses and Angel becomes a mother, ripples pass through her family and each one changes their life in some way or another, each begins to face some of what they’ve been hiding from, and they all draw closer together. It’s not a happy story, nor is it your typical happy ending. But it is a satisfying one. I didn’t enjoy this book much until I hit the last quarter – then things all seemed to pull together somehow. I was surprised that a book that hadn’t really gripped me much, that was full of such unsympathetic and seemingly doomed characters, could somehow end up making me glad to have read it. It’s not perfect, nor is it my favourite book of the year, but it was good enough to beat out three other books in my rankings, then move up when I got it again in my next round (it came fourth in my first round and second in my most recent round)! I definitely think it’s worth a try, particularly if you enjoy moral ambiguity, complex relationships and a story that carries social commentary in its core.
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 TĂve, 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. – Goodreads
Book Title:Â The Five Wounds
Author:Â Kirstin Valdez Quade
Series:Â No
Edition:Â Paperback/Audiobook
Published By:Â W. W. Norton Company
Released:Â April 6, 2021
Genre: Fiction, Family, Addiction, Illness, Parenthood
Pages:Â 448
Date Read: April 25-May 8, 2022
Rating: 7/10
Average Goodreads Rating:Â 4.16/5 (11,990 ratings)