The Five Wounds: A Novel
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.
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Community Reviews
Quade uses deceptively simple, unself-conscious prose to ply canny, squeamish, and sometimes hilarious observations as her characters fumble, rise, blaze up in glory, fall again— fighting against poverty, trauma, circumstances, their shadow selves, and each other. It's occasionally heartbreaking (but always fascinating) riding shotgun on their cautious gambits and calamitous mistakes and sensing their fleeting, panicked awareness that the most persistent threat to their happiness is almost certainly themselves.
This novel dovetails wonderfully with some non-fiction books I've read recently about trauma, and how abandonment, abuse, and trauma create a perfect storm in the nervous system. If you've experienced or studied trauma, or undergone therapy for it, you'll recognize the responses of these characters as they navigate freighted but hopeful relationships as best they can, with outcomes that vary by the degree of fear or self-loathing — or by how they negotiate with it internally.
If it sounds bleak, it isn't. Or rather, it is, and it isn't. These characters care about things, and even when they step on their own feet it's not for lack of passion. Like the desert climate it's set in, the world and the culture this family confronts is godforsaken, but godly, too — in the most expansive way. And like many things that grow in that climate, they are tough, underwatered, and tenacious.
The most succinct and awestruck thing I can say about this book is that it rings so fucking true. Like only the best novels do, it caused me to glimpse the magical under-layer, of how we are all connected by our yearnings and sufferings. It was a kind of embrace, and I'm sorry to let it go.
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