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Summary
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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
National Book Critics Circle Award winner Quade's penetrating debut novel (expanded from a story in Night at the Fiestas) tells of a man's quest for self-acceptance through the metaphor of the five wounds Jesus suffered during crucifixion. In the blighted New Mexico village of Las Penas, Amadeo Padilla, a heavily tattooed, ambitionless, unemployed alcoholic, has been tapped to play Jesus in the yearly reenactment of the Passion play orchestrated by the "hermandad," or the Hermanos Penitentes, a secretive order of devoted, self-flagellating Catholics. Amadeo, along with his pregnant teenage daughter Angel (who shows up unannounced during "Passion Week") and his silently suffering mother, Yolanda, who was recently diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma, complicate Amadeo's path to redemption. Tragedy abounds when Angel is expelled from her hybrid GED-parenting program, Amadeo's alcoholism causes a life-threatening accident, and Yolanda's cancer worsens. Eventually, Amadeo realizes that immediate redemption is overrated, but his devotion to thoughts of Jesus's suffering may just yield hard-fought transcendence. The well-developed characters convey palpable emotion as Amadeo's failures as a father, partner, entrepreneur, and even as Jesus translate into fits of rage and frustration. Quade's rendering of a singular community is pitch perfect. (Apr.)
Guardian Review
The Five Wounds began life in 2009, as a story in the New Yorker. In the run-up to Easter, in a village in New Mexico, Amadeo - a 33-year-old unemployed, deadbeat alcoholic who lives with his mother - is preparing to be Jesus in a ritual re-enactment of the crucifixion. He carries the cross and then has his hands nailed to it in front of the watching crowd, which includes his 15-year-old daughter, Angel, who is eight months pregnant. Quade was asked by her editor if she'd considered turning the story into a novel; she thought it was finished, yet found herself repeatedly coming back to the same family dynamics. And so The Five Wounds returns as a fully formed novel about three generations striving for the redemption that Amadeo aims for and misses in spectacular fashion on the cross. Quade picks up her story with Angel's frustrated reaction to her father's display: what she really needs is a dad who can actually help her, not perform empty gestures. How will he hold the baby with holes in his hands? In truth, you can still feel the joins between the original story and the rest of the book. But once you're in, you're really in, as Quade tightens the screws (hammers the nails?) on all her struggling characters. The village of Las Penas may be fictional, but the problems its Latinx families experience are all too real: lives are torn apart, slowly or suddenly, by unemployment, abuse, drink-driving, and addiction (there's a heroin crisis in the community, as if booze wasn't bad enough: "it's genocide, and we're doing it to ourselves"). Amadeo's attempts to become a better father and son are frequently excruciating: his plans to get rich fixing broken windshields with a kit he bought after viewing an infomercial give him the unbearably ill-fated optimism of an Arthur Miller character. Indulged by Yolanda, his long-suffering mother, he has never learned to take responsibility for his life. But every generation of this family has its own cross to bear, as it were. Yolanda discovers she has a brain tumour, which she keeps secret, with a resentful lack of faith in her family's ability to cope that builds as steadily as the cancerous growth. Angel is the warm heart of the book: an irrepressible creation, intently focused on finishing school, providing a better life for her child, and just bursting with love, yet also thrumming with all the usual uncertainties of being a teenager. She attends a class for expecting teens, where she becomes enamoured of her (white, middle-class) teacher, Brianna, and a troubled, charismatic fellow student called Lizette. Clashes ensue, muddied by Brianna dating Amadeo - an unlikely turn of events for which Quade finds an elegant, persuasive impulse. Indeed, her story ticks along with a strong sense of horrible inevitability - every poor decision excavated and made very real. You are utterly within these characters, and within their world - dreaming of a better life, just as they do. After a slow start, The Five Wounds turns into a propulsive, immersive story that reckons wisely with the real cost of redemption.
Kirkus Review
As members of the Padilla family navigate their way through the harsh realities of life in northern New Mexico over the course of a year, they discover the depths of their faith in each other and in themselves. The Padillas are an old family from the fading village of Las Penas, but now they've dwindled to four people: the matriarch, Yolanda; her two adult children, Amadeo and Valerie; and her elderly Tío Tíve, head of the village's morada, an informal religious meeting house, where he has chosen Amadeo for the role of Jesus in the upcoming Good Friday procession. Amadeo, unemployed and alcoholic, still lives with his mother. As the book opens, Yolanda is on vacation in Las Vegas; Amadeo's estranged teenage daughter, Angel, shows up on his doorstep, pregnant, after having had a fight with her mother, and Amadeo reluctantly takes her in. Angel, who is in a school for teenage mothers, idolizes her teacher, Brianna, a young woman from Oregon. Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Yolanda goes to the emergency room and receives a devastating diagnosis, sending her back home to her children and grandchildren, determined to find a way to fix the crumbling foundations of their relationships. However, the birth of Angel's son and Amadeo's lifelong habit of financial and emotional dependence on his mother blind them to Yolanda's rapidly declining health. When Brianna instigates a secret sexual relationship with Amadeo, they are each guilty of being selfish and careless with Angel's life, but it is Brianna who causes a series of reverberating consequences for Angel and the other girls in the program while she walks away unscathed. With beautifully layered relationships and an honest yet profoundly empathetic picture of a rural community--where the families proudly trace their roots back to the Spanish conquistadors while struggling with poverty and a deadly drug epidemic--this novel is a brilliant meditation on love and redemption. Perfectly rendered characters anchor a novel built around a fierce, flawed, and loving family. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Amadeo Padilla, 35, filled the role of Jesus during the re-creation of the Crucifixion as part of Holy Week, and he also has heavy burdens to bear in real life. Nothing comes easy in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico. His pregnant teen daughter, Angel, who is both bubbly and frail and a real show-stealer, has left her mother's place and is looking for a new home. The matriarch of the family, Yolanda Padilla, who is the only one drawing a steady paycheck, is dying of a brain tumor. And with memories of an absent father haunting him, Amadeo struggles to find his feet. The arrival of Connor, Angel's baby, forces Amadeo to recast his responsibilities as he earnestly tries to provide some ballast for the family. For her part, the bright and tenacious Angel is determined to make the best of her circumstances while enrolled in a government program for teen mothers. Quade (Night at the Fiestas, 2015) ably delivers a story that is nuanced and authentic without a whiff of melodrama. "Angel is sick of irrevocability: of fights, of illness, of death," she writes in this generous tale of characters who understand the inevitability of fate but try to forge ahead anyway in the hope of breaking free.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT NOVEL Quade follows up her John Leonard Prize-winning debut collection, Night of the Fiestas, by expanding on perhaps its best story. In Las Penas, NM, 33-year-old hard-drinking, going-nowhere Amadeo unexpectedly plays the part of Jesus in the town's surprisingly realistic portrayal of the Passion of Christ during Holy Week. Just as unexpectedly, his pregnant, near-16-year-old daughter Angel, fed up with her own mother, drops in to live with him and his mother, Yolanda. What results is a profoundly affecting story that smoothly expands to include the lives of family, friends, and the entire community of hardscrabble Las Penas. Yolanda, who has tended to her whole troubled family, now has issues of her own, while her smug, crusading daughter Valerie, with two interestingly contrary daughters of her own, makes trouble for Amadeo and Angel. Owing to her pregnancy, Angel attends special classes, where she develops complex relationships with sexually charged student Lizette and the emotionally imprisoned and ultimately obstructionist teacher, Brianna. The baby's arrival brings joy and a moment of supreme, heartrending panic as the narrative reaches its graceful conclusion. VERDICT Expertly crafted, this story of family and community introduces us to often needy characters for whom readers come to care deeply. Highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
