User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I first read the short story that grew into this novel in Kirstin's short story collection Night at the Fiestas and it stayed with me. I was thrilled when I learned of the novel and it did not disappoint. One of my favorite things about this novel is how the author allows her characters to be flawed, to make bad decisions, to delude themselves, while also allowing their best qualities to shine through. By the end of the novel, I was so attached to Angel and Yolanda and Amadeo and even Lissette and Ryan and the rest of the characters. There was real tenderness in how she told their stories and to follow a year in their lives was so incredibly satisfying. This is an outstanding, unforgettable novel.
Rating: really liked it
A glorious book that is full-hearted, rich in emotion, and unflinching in the flaws it is willing to explore. I don't think my humdrum words in a review will do it much justice, so I'll keep this short. I will say, however, that it is not easy to fully investigate the failings of characters while still enticing the reader to pull for them. And yet, she accomplishes this, over and over again.
Kirstin Valdez Quade is a tremendous talent that deserves to be read. I plan on checking out her short stories next.
I can nitpick around the edges, but this book doesn't deserve to be nitpicked. I imagine the readers who found the characters too unlikeable are themselves boring, down to their marrow, and confuse their monotone lifestyle for some achievement.
We are humans. We make mistakes, act illogically, and hurt the people around us. Then we pick ourselves up and try to do slightly better the next time.
Rating: really liked it
Las Penas, New Mexico. Amadeo is a man who depends on his mother. He drinks too much, is accountable to no one and so far whatever endeavor he has undertaken, has failed. He always has plans that never come to fruition, but this changes when his 15 year old, very pregnant daughter, arrives on his doorstep. Can he be the father, that he never was before? Yolanda, his mother has always been there for him, his staunch defender, but what if she can no longer be depended on? There is much thinking to be done in this family, many adjustments and realignments, and that is the story. Things are always darkest before the dawn. Or so they say.
A wonderfully written book, the writing is so smooth and the story exemplifies the many issues families face. There is much dysfunction, but underneath there are strong bonds and much love. Many mistakes are made and I just wanted them to get their act together. It starts with a reenactment of Christ's crucifixion, but religion is not the main theme of this book, though it does come in to play here and there. Likable characters, even those of whose actions I disapproved. Teen pregnancy is also highlighted, the difficulties they face with this less than advantageous start in adulthood.
ARC from Edelweiss.
Rating: really liked it
one of those books that made me slow down because i couldn’t bear the thought of missing out on a single lyrically written sentence
maybe my favorite character study - i cared about every page
reminds us that all humans are flawed and none of us are able to put our best selves forward 100% of the time due to an infinite number of factors
painful, beautifully mundane, an accurate depiction of connection and relationships
so very human 💛
Rating: really liked it
Anyone who has had the privilege of reading Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Night of the Fiestas -- one of my favorite short story collections– will instantly recognize the characters that populate her new novel.
The Five Wounds – which refer to the five wounds of Christ – takes place during Holy Week in New Mexico, where a religious brotherhood called the Hermanos Penitentes recreate the crucifixion. Amadeo Padilla is a most unlikely Jesus, who has experienced the five wounds of the soul, including rejection, betrayal, and humiliation. His young immensely pregnant teenage daughter, Angel, whom he deserted as a child, arrives at his door as he prepares feverishly for the role. When he tells her he will be carrying the cross, her sarcastic answer: “And I’m the Virgin Mary.”
The story (also entitled Five Wounds) is powerful and for the first few chapters, we are on familiar territory. But it is the author’s intention to fill out her story, dig deeper, and introduce us to characters who are so real that it is hard to leave them at the book’s close.
The theme is love as both gift and challenge. And that describes Angel’s baby, Connor, to a tee. A joyful baby who nonetheless is demanding—as all babies are—is the glue that brings together Amadeo, his mother Yolanda, his ex-wife Marissa whom Angel is estranged from, and drop-out classmate moms who, like Angel, are preparing for their GED. Each of these characters must muddle through the murky issues of their past and somehow, just somehow, take themselves in hand to forge forward to a better future.
I loved this book. I loved his big-heartedness, its gritty authenticity, its depiction of our human sins and frailties and its promise of redemption. I found myself rooting for Amadeo and Angel at every turn. By the end, I was simultaneously turning pages quickly and trying to slow down to make the book last longer. I owe a big thanks to W.W. Norton, who (with a little shameless begging from me) provided an advance review copy in exchange for an honest review. I am sure this book will be on my Best of 2021 list!
Rating: really liked it
[4.5] If I was observing the Padilla family as a neighbor (without Quade's wise insight), I'm sure I would judge them harshly. They all screw up over and over again. 16-year old pregnant Angel. Her alcoholic, unemployed father - who makes so many bad choices that I found myself yelling at him aloud. Her self-centered mother with her bad boyfriend. Even her grandmother Yolanda, the wisest of the bunch, makes some bad decisions. Yet Quade spins her magic and made me care deeply for each of them.
There is so much heart in this book. I couldn't get enough of this family. They fall down and get up again and keep trying. They love each other and won't let go. Quade writes so beautifully and intricately about her characters' lives that they seemed real to me. I hope she writes another book about them. I can't get them out of my head and would love to know how they are doing.
Rating: really liked it
Shortlisted for The Center of Fiction’s 2021 First Novel Prize
“To those children and youth who fight so hard for their future and ours: you give me hope”.
…..Kirsten Valdez Quade
Kirsten Valdez Quade, winner of the National Book Critics John Leonard Prize, is a gifted storyteller….worthy of her award acknowledgments …
…..a recipient of a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, the Rome Prize, a Stegner Fellowship, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, etc. She’s also an assistant-professor at Princeton.
Having now read two of her books —I’m a forever fan.
Kirsten Valdez Quade writes with SO MUCH HEART!!!!
….entertaining with masterful storytelling while punching our guts at the same time!
I can’t recommend Kirsten Valdez Quade enough….
….to the fiction readers, classic readers, literary readers, historical fiction readers, women’s readers, multi-cultural readers….
to miss never reading her work — would be like a voracious reader never ever having read Stegner, or Steinbeck, Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, Anne Tyler, Austin, or even Dicken’s or Tolstoy —
It’s time that KIRSTEN VALDEZ QUADE’S name floats to the top along with other top-known-authors around the world. SHE IS THAT GOOD!!!
Her collection of short stories “Night at the Fiestas” (a great tribute to the Latinx community), was page-turning engrossing —one of the best entertaining batch of short stories I had ever read.
Again—like in “Night at the Fiestas”, the storytelling in “The Five Wounds” is intimate, packed filled with realistic situations, love, family, innocence, struggles after struggles….full range of emotions, with characters we ache and root for.
…Angel is pregnant…out of wedlock. She is 16. She gives birth to baby Conner. …while working on getting her GED.
…Amadeo, Angel’s father, goes to the refrigerator one too many times for another beer. A jobless alcoholic. He wants to do better by his daughter.
…Yolanda, Angel’s grandmother, (Angel’s rock), is dying of cancer.
…Marissa, is Angel’s mother. Angel had a falling out with her when she was nine months pregnant and left to live with her father and grandmother.
…Tio Tive, (the uncle)
…Brianna, (Angel’s teacher at “Smart Starts”, a school for pregnant girls),
…The supporting characters add substantial flavor to the story….
…complexities, shock, betrayal, misunderstandings, regrets, and other cracks in the founds submerge with the domestic drama exposing sobering choices, unexpected pleasures, and rich rewards for any reader.
Here’s a few excerpts to offer a ‘feel’….
“Yolanda is an optimist. Yolanda considers her self a happy person. Her life is filled with love and family and friends. She ‘likes’ people, believes that they are basically good. But this doesn’t change the simultaneous belief that the universe is essentially malevolent, life booby-trapped with disaster. The evidence is clear: so many bodies damaged and beaten and destroyed, washed up on the shores of her life. And her own body, harboring it’s deadly secret knot. It doesn’t seem normal, the sheer quantity of awfulness crowded into her family. Sure, every family has its problems, but her family problems are uglier”.
The dialogue is - at times hilarious:
“It’s true, Gramma. Studies have shown that it’s easier for teenagers. Angel has brightened. My teacher, Brianna? She told us that younger girls have less C-sections. All these old ladies waiting ‘til they’re forty, they’re the ones who make problems for themselves. I see them in the grocery store, looking at me all judgy, but they’re jealous”.
“So, cooking olive oil? Just regular stuff from the kitchen? She shakes her head. No, thank you very much. I want real hospital-approved stuff on my shee-shee”.
“Amadeo slaps his hands over his ears. Mom!”
“Just call it a vagina, Mother”.
“She’d always thought there was room for fights, for cruelty, that things would work themselves out, given enough time, given enough honest conversation. She hadn’t ever really wanted to push any of them away— she was only asking them to draw her close again, testing to see whether they let her go. and always, always, they’ve let her go”.
The only person who wouldn’t let her go is her grandmother, but her grandmother was dead”.
The language is gorgeous…
The story shimmers and pierces…
Exquisite masterfully storytelling.
Rating: really liked it
The Five Wounds: A Novel was an enchanting debut novel by Kirstin Valdez Quade taking place in northern New Mexico in a fictional small and run-down town of Las Penas, just outside Espanola and most likely on the high road to Taos. New Mexico is rich in history and traditions dating back to the time of the conquistadores from Spain coming to the area. The book opens as thirty-three year old Amadeo Padilla has been chosen by the hermanos to be Jesus and to carry a cross that he is building out of heavy rough oak in the reenactmenet of the passion of Christ and the crucifixion, the
Penitentes. Amadeo is unemployed and without much ambition as well as a severe problem with alcohol abuse. Therefore, he is looking at this opportunity to portray Jesus in the procession and crucifixion on Good Friday as a way of getting his life on track and under control, perhaps a new beginning.
"This afternoon, though, even Amadeo's tatoos seem to strain with his exertion, and he's seeing himself from outside and above. A flaming Sacred Heart beats against his left pectoral, sweat drips from the point of a bloodied dagger on his bicep, and the roses winding around his side bloom against the heat of his effort. On his back, the Guadalupana glistens brilliantly, her dress scarred with three vertical cuts of the sellos, the secret seals of obligation. The lines, each the length of a man's hand, are raised and pink and newly healed, evidence of his initiation into the hermandad."
"He feels like a star: he is young, he is strong, he could carry this cross all day. The sky is the deep blue of spring, the air still cool and spiced with the smell of pinon. The fluting notes of the pito sound thinner up here, competing with the breeze and the birds."
However, complicating his feverish preparation for this honor is the falling out his fifteen-year old daughter had with her mother and Angel leaving her home in Espanola, showing up on the porch of her grandmother's home where Amadeo is living. Angel is pregnant and attending a special program for pregnant teens to ensure that they will study for their GED while learning how to care for themselves and their babies. Amadeo's plans are further complicated in that his mother, Yolanda, has suddenly left to vaction in Las Vegas for a few weeks. And then there is his sister Valerie with her issues and Yolanda's revered uncle, Tio Tive. So with this family's five generations and their dysfunctional relationships, a beautiful story of the plight of the Padilla family emerges through all of the chaos and heartache but in such a compelling way, sometimes darkly humorous, at other times heartbreaking over the course of a year.
This is a new author to me but one that I will definitely follow. Originally from New Mexico, her short stories have appeared in many publications such as
The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, and
The O. Henry Prize Stories. It has been said that her writing weaves together the underlying themes of family, race, class, and coming-of-age, all in the beautiful and enchanting New Mexico landscapes. The underlying theme in this book is the prevalence of drug addiction and drug cartels in this small community impacting the lives of all living there. This being my favorite part of the country, I am delighted to find such a talented writer as I am drawn to books about New Mexico and its history and its people.
Rating: really liked it
4.5, rounded up. This was the most pleasurable reading experience I've had in several months, brimming with human warmth and connection. Valdez Quade doesn't judge her characters, who are deeply flawed people in difficult circumstances, living in a working-class Latinx community in northern New Mexico ravaged by multi-generational poverty and the opioid epidemic.
The novel follows a year in the life-- from one Holy Week to another-- of a fractured family barely staying afloat in one house in the declining village of Las Penas: Yolanda, a hardworking secretary in her 50s, her large adult son Amadeo, and his pregnant teen daughter Angel.
When I read novels, I don't care whether fictional characters are relatable or (even worse) likable. But Amadeo, the central protagonist, is a human whom all responsible adults would judge with severe harshness: a listless, undisciplined, unemployed, unemployable alcoholic mama's boy who physically abused the mother of his child. Valdez Quade's supple narrative voice doesn't directly judge him, though, while never flinching from the stark facts of the consequential and very real damage that his indolence, self-absorption, and carelessness inflicts, and continues to inflict, upon the people he loves. Ultimately, his weaknesses are stronger than his good intentions.
The Five Wounds began as a masterful 2009 New Yorker short story, about Amadeo joining the Penitentes, an all-male lay religious order that organizes an annual passion play on Good Friday. He decides to play a crucified Jesus at age 33, in the misbegotten hope that this performance of suffering (replete with real nails) will somehow enable him to pull his life together.
Valdez Quade opens up the story and allows her characters room to breathe and to live (and die), approaching Yolanda and Angel's strands of the story with equally great compassion. Although the narrative pace slackens in the third quarter, I enjoyed every moment I spent with them.
Like Douglas Stuart in Shuggie Bain, Valdez Quade omnisciently narrates the inner thoughts of her characters in a highly eloquent literary-fiction register. This gives the reader access into their subjective perspectives, and allows us to know things they know about themselves and each other but cannot articulate with precision and insight. But sometimes it's discordant with the earthy dialogue, which is extremely revealing nonetheless.
I hope that this honest, moving, shocking, and miraculous novel will garner more attention than it has so far.
Rating: really liked it
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3 ½ stars
“Is this what motherhood means? Being suddenly able to pity the adults in your life?”
Set over the course of a year in Las Penas, New Mexico,
The Five Wounds is a novel about failure and progress. Unsentimental yet moving
The Five Wounds details the everyday lives of three members of the Padilla family. There is Angel who is sixteen and pregnant. After her mother (who was also a teen mom) fails her in the worst way imaginable Angel moves in with her deadbeat father (who still lives with his mother). Amadeo is thirty-three, self-involved, jobless, and expects his mother to look after him. Yolanda, in her fifties, who has always been the family’s 'rock' has little time for either of them after receiving an end-of-life diagnosis.
The narrative focuses in particular on Angel and Amadeo. Angel is attending a special program for teen moms and hopes that she will be able to carry on her studies while also looking after her son. Yet, the adults around, even her loving grandmother, seems to be too occupied to offer her any real support. Her mother tries to make amends but Angel is unable to forgive her. She becomes close with Lizette, another girl from the group, who is in an even more disadvantageous position than Angel herself.
Amadeo spends most of his days blaming others for his less than stellar life. He drinks too much, does very little for other people, and acts like a child around his sister who is one of the few people who calls him out on his shitty behaviour. Amadeo is indeed proves himself time and again to be a bit of shit. He often calls women bitches, he's blind to his mother's failing health, and takes pleasure in knowing that if he wants he could get his sister off his back by appearing intimidating (and he knows that she was in an abusive relationship). In many ways, he was a Frank Gallagher sort of figure. We do see that he does try now and again to be there for his daughter, but as soon as things don’t go his ways he defaults to blaming others for his own failures and shortcomings. He feels some sense of purpose when he plays Jesus in the Good Friday procession but it does not last as it seems to briefly give him a conflated sense of himself (he habitually compares himself to Jesus, sometimes hilariously so: "Amadeo imagines windshield repair is a trade Jesus might get behind. It is, essentially, carpentry for the twenty-first century).
I appreciated that Angel is not made into a caricature of a teenager (even if the author makes the point of making all teen girls in this novel unable of applying makeup: their faces are caked with foundation, their lashes clumpy with mascara...). She clearly wants someone she can look up to, and she briefly thinks that Brianna, who is in charge at that teenage mother's group, but more often than not she’s left disappointed. Even Lizette proves to be less than dependable and it was saddening to see how few people are there for Angel.
The author’s style is very matter-of-fact but also capable of piercing observations or touching exchanges. The tragicomic tone succeeds in making occasional fun of the characters, Amadeo in particular, without belittling them and allowing us to sympathise with them and their efforts to be better or improve their circumstances. Some may not like that the story leaves quite a few storylines unresolved but I thought that it fitted with the novel’s realistic and dry storytelling. What lessened my reading experience was the way Yolanda was pushed on the outskirts of the narrative so that her presence in the story seems minimal. While I understand that the story was making a point, showing us how self-involved Amadeo and Angel are not to notice that Yolanda is also going through a difficult time, we could have had more chapters following Yolanda perspective. Instead, we get unnecessary passages centric on Brianna, one of the novel’s least believable and interesting character. Lizette’s portrayal too was a bit wanting (in particularly her self-harming) and I could have done without the adults drinking breastmilk scene (if I had a nickel for every time I came across this sort of scene in a book, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice).
Part of me also wishes that we could have had less homophobia ("He's not gay. That's gross") or that at least the narrative could have challenged some of those comments. I get that it was 'realistic' but the story just seems to confirm that there can be no happy (or at least functional) queer couple.
Overall this was a realistic portrayal of a less-than-perfect family. The characters are flawed, they say and or do offensive/unlikable things, their circumstances are less-than-ideal, their relationships with each other can be frustrating and messy. The author succeeds in not only depicting the day-to-day lives of the Padillas but she also captures, for better or worse, their community in Las Penas. The novel’s religious undertones did not feel distracting nor did they take away from the narrative’s factual style. There was something about this novel that really brought to mind Showtime's
Shameless so if you a fan of that show you might want to give
The Five Wounds a try.
ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
This was an expansive, emotional, and ultimately hopeful read that asked for a lot and gave what it got. It took me to some difficult places, and approaching the end I wondered if it was going to leave me crying by the side of the road, but it came back for me and it’s one of my most anticipated releases of 2021. The strengths and flaws of the characters in this book are so well crafted and true; I really felt it.
Rating: really liked it
Not a perfect book, but I definitely got five stars worth of reading enjoyment from this wonderful debut novel about a dysfunctional Latinx family. I especially liked Quade’s mix of humor and trauma, great sense of place (New Mexico), and warm-hearted respect for her characters’ struggles and failures. I’m happy to see this has won the Center for Fiction’s 2021 First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the Carnegie Prize for Fiction.
Rating: really liked it
A really wonderful, slow-paced, character driven story that I thoroughly enjoyed diving into
Watch my full thoughts in my August wrap up: https://youtu.be/R0kYGbjNVnM
Rating: really liked it
2.5 rounded down
Many of my Goodreads friends and other reviewers have rated this highly, but I'm sorry to say I really struggled with The Five Wounds: A Novel.
Perhaps my expectations were set too high or I just picked this up at the wrong time, but I have to say I found the story to be relentlessly miserable with little sign of hope for the complex but flawed cast of characters. Now of course complicated and unlikeable characters do not make a novel a bad one, and I don't think this is a bad novel; it's just not one I felt compelled to pick up or one I felt all that invested in. Amadeo is an awful character, and I didn't want to spend one more minute in his company.
There is however no question that Kirstin Valdez Quade can write, and I'd been keen to try her other books to see if I gel with those better.
Thank you Netgalley and Serpent's Tail/Viper/Profile Books for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
When it comes to dysfunctional family drama, there is no shortage of novels. They often merge and blur for me, many devoid of distinction. But then there’s Kirstin Valdez Quade, who created an imaginative, exciting, and richly textured story that conveys the fearsome weight of familial love. The Padilla family in rural New Mexico threaded its way into my heart and I hurt when they bled, wept when they cried, and rooted for their hard won humble triumphs. As I inhabited them for a year in these 400+ pages (that fly too fast), I became a resident in their lives. I didn’t want to leave them; I dreaded a final page.
It opens with 33 year-old Amadeo, a single drifter, jobless and alcoholic, still living with his mother. He has decided that playing Jesus this year in the annual Holy Week celebration will provide redemption for his lost soul, which includes a simulacrum of the crucifixion. (And Amadeo is the same age that Jesus was on the crucifixion.) He’s a failed father about to become a grandfather to his 16 year-old daughter’s baby, and he is ill-equipped and full of shame for his inadequacies.
Angel, nine months pregnant, has had a falling out with her mother, Marissa (Amadeo’s ex), and comes to live with Amadeo and her beloved grandmother, Yolanda. Yolanda is the rock of the family, who sacrifices her own wellbeing to a fault. She enables Amadeo’s immaturity because she, too, is lost on how to help him. Everyone has a dark past, and secrets are kept while mistakes are made. Each hopes that baby Connor will be the glue that brings this rocky family together.
Valdez Quade’s characters are so brimming, alive, authentic and sympathetic that they affirmed what it is to be human, flaws and all. Angel, struggling to protect and nurture Connor while obtaining her GED in a teen mothers’ program, has conflicted feelings about her own parents, who failed to be positive role models while she was a child. “Watching her mother with her son, Angel felt compassion that vexed her, because she doesn’t owe her mother anything—compassion least of all. Is this what motherhood means? Being suddenly able to pity the adults in your life?”
Roles are periodically tested, opposed, and reversed. Family members withhold, fall apart, come together. Get ready, as you will be installed in everyone’s head and heart from start to finish. Themes of love, betrayal, substance abuse, parenting, and the question of redemption prevail throughout the novel, with characters that are both universal and specific. Valdez Quade is a superb storyteller; the seamless narrative comes together organically, with a robust, balanced tone of potency and levity.
Thank you to W.W.Norton for sending me an ARC. It surpassed my expectations and will surely make my favorites list this year.
