Status
Available
Collection
Publication
W. W. Norton & Company (2022), 448 pages
Description
"From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel following a New Mexican family's extraordinary year of love and sacrifice. 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. Their reunion sets her own life down a startling path. Vivid, tender, darkly 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, whom Angel isn't speaking to; and disapproving Tio Tive, keeper of the family's history. In the absorbing, realist tradition of Elizabeth Strout and Jonathan Franzen, 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"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member BookConcierge
4.5****
Amadeo Padilla can never catch a break, but maybe now, finally, he’s on his way. He’s been chosen to play Jesus in the annual Good Friday procession, and he’s determined to give it his all. But on his big day, his fifteen-year-old daughter, Angel, shows up, hugely pregnant and needing
The opening chapter of this marvelous character-driven work was a short story in Quade’s collection, Night At the Fiestas. I admit that I could not imagine how she would turn that short story into a full-length novel, but she did a marvelous job of building on the idea to flesh out the characters.
What I wrote about the short-story collection holds true here as well: ”What Quade’s characters share is that desire to “be someone else” and/or somewhere else, but no real means of achieving that. They dream, but are somehow powerless to change their circumstances, falling back on old patterns of behavior, afraid to let go of their past to head into the future.”
Amadeo, his mother, Yolanda, and Angel all struggle with the unfairness of life. With limited education and few opportunities to succeed they stay stuck in a pattern of repeated mistakes. Yolanda has never stopped babying Amadeo, her youngest child and the prized son, whose father died too young. She has never allowed him to learn how to fail and, more importantly, how to recover from failure. He’s like a full-grown toddler in his approach to life. He’s dependent on his mother for shelter, food, gas and beer money. And he is powerless to help his own daughter, whom he’s barely seen since she was a tiny child.
Yolanda deals with her problems by denying they exist. She soldiers on, taking one exhausted (and exhausting) step after another, with no way out of her difficulties. She cannot bring herself to ask for help or to accept it if it’s offered … but who would offer since she doesn’t let anyone know there IS a problem.
And Angel, the poor kid, is genuinely trying her best to finish high school, get the right nutrition for her baby, ensure that the infant is cared for and nurtured to develop appropriately. I loved the scenes where she would talk to him to enrich him and encourage the development of language. But the reader cannot forget that she is still a child herself. And desperately seeking love wherever she can find it.
Quade gives us a marvelous cast of supporting characters as well, from Tio Tive (the family patriarch) to Brianna, who leads the program for teen mothers at Angel’s alternative school, to Angel’s mom, Marissa, all of them are fully realized and add to the dynamic of this family’s difficult relationships.
Despite how they infuriated me, and how often I wanted to just shake some sense into them, I wound up really loving these characters. Some of that was because Quade often gave the reader some hope for a change in circumstances (often short-lived hope, but hope nonetheless). One character sums it up best: Love is both a gift and a challenge.
Amadeo Padilla can never catch a break, but maybe now, finally, he’s on his way. He’s been chosen to play Jesus in the annual Good Friday procession, and he’s determined to give it his all. But on his big day, his fifteen-year-old daughter, Angel, shows up, hugely pregnant and needing
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shelter. The opening chapter of this marvelous character-driven work was a short story in Quade’s collection, Night At the Fiestas. I admit that I could not imagine how she would turn that short story into a full-length novel, but she did a marvelous job of building on the idea to flesh out the characters.
What I wrote about the short-story collection holds true here as well: ”What Quade’s characters share is that desire to “be someone else” and/or somewhere else, but no real means of achieving that. They dream, but are somehow powerless to change their circumstances, falling back on old patterns of behavior, afraid to let go of their past to head into the future.”
Amadeo, his mother, Yolanda, and Angel all struggle with the unfairness of life. With limited education and few opportunities to succeed they stay stuck in a pattern of repeated mistakes. Yolanda has never stopped babying Amadeo, her youngest child and the prized son, whose father died too young. She has never allowed him to learn how to fail and, more importantly, how to recover from failure. He’s like a full-grown toddler in his approach to life. He’s dependent on his mother for shelter, food, gas and beer money. And he is powerless to help his own daughter, whom he’s barely seen since she was a tiny child.
Yolanda deals with her problems by denying they exist. She soldiers on, taking one exhausted (and exhausting) step after another, with no way out of her difficulties. She cannot bring herself to ask for help or to accept it if it’s offered … but who would offer since she doesn’t let anyone know there IS a problem.
And Angel, the poor kid, is genuinely trying her best to finish high school, get the right nutrition for her baby, ensure that the infant is cared for and nurtured to develop appropriately. I loved the scenes where she would talk to him to enrich him and encourage the development of language. But the reader cannot forget that she is still a child herself. And desperately seeking love wherever she can find it.
Quade gives us a marvelous cast of supporting characters as well, from Tio Tive (the family patriarch) to Brianna, who leads the program for teen mothers at Angel’s alternative school, to Angel’s mom, Marissa, all of them are fully realized and add to the dynamic of this family’s difficult relationships.
Despite how they infuriated me, and how often I wanted to just shake some sense into them, I wound up really loving these characters. Some of that was because Quade often gave the reader some hope for a change in circumstances (often short-lived hope, but hope nonetheless). One character sums it up best: Love is both a gift and a challenge.
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LibraryThing member nivramkoorb
This is the first novel by Quade but I read her previous award winning collection of short stories. I thought the novel was superior. It takes place in Northern New Mexico in a small town about an hour north of Santa Fe. The story works around a dysfunctional family. The main characters are Angel,
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15 and 8 months pregnant, Amadeo her 33 year old absentee dad who has a history of drinking and failing, and his mother Yolanda who holds the family together. There are lot of other characters introduced with Brianna, Angel's teacher in a program for young pregnant girls also a main character. The reader goes in and out each of the main character's heads. Quade really does pile on the problems at a brisk pace so that the book was very sad to me but also very real. Fiction gives you an opportunity to views the lives of people that exist in the world but whose path you will never cross. I constantly was questioning their decision making but by the end of the book it seemed to work. The writing is excellent. If you like family dramas then you will enjoy this book. This is an author who I will continue to read. Show Less
LibraryThing member brangwinn
And still they moved forward. Amadeo Padilla, age 33, lives with his mother, in a small New Mexico town. His pregnant 16-year-old-daughter moves in with them. Amadeo drinks and has lost his driver’s license again because of a DUI. He is unemployed and has no ambition. His mother is the
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breadwinner, working for the legislature in Santa Fe, but her problems are even worse. She has brain cancer and refuses to tell her family. This excellent character-driven book portrays the challenges many blue-collar workers in an area filled with poverty face. Its family that keeps them together and family that provides the motivation to move forward. Show Less
LibraryThing member Beamis12
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
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.
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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.
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LibraryThing member Beth.Clarke
I can't get over that this is the author's debut novel. It's about family relationships, traditions, and life in a small New Mexico town. Each complicated character is portrayed in such a way that the reader gets inside their head. You can't help but love and root for each one of them. This is one
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of the most moving novels I've read in a long time. Show Less
LibraryThing member NeedMoreShelves
This is a fantastic novel. The author writes characters that are so rich, and she gives them so much space - to love, to regret, to make bad decisions, to pick themselves back up - that it becomes so rewarding for the reader to spend time with them. I absolutely loved walking with this family
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through a year in their lives. Show Less
LibraryThing member mojomomma
Amadeo is the middle generation and one of the few men in this book. The Easter he portrays Jesus on the Stations of the Cross procession it the same Holy Week his pregnant daughters arrives from her mother's house and his mother comes back from her trip to Las Vegas with a brain tumor. Amadeo is a
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perpetual screw-up. His mother and his daughter bail him out all the time. Through his mother's long death, he eventually grows up--even though he is a grandfather at age 33. Show Less
LibraryThing member reader1009
audiobook fiction - DNF, had trouble getting into characters, particularly the father
LibraryThing member novelcommentary
I happened upon this novel when my local Overdrive site offered it up as a group read. I'm glad I picked up on what turned out to be a wonderful read. The narration centers around three generations of a poor Hispanic family, living in New Mexico. Yolanda goes to work every day, supporting her
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The buttons of her jeans are unsnapped to make way for its fullness, and also to indicate how this happened in the first place.
Most of the families out here have been on the same land for hundreds of years. Trailers and newer cinderblock structures are wedged into yards alongside crumbling adobe ruins. Some families, like the Romeros, continue to farm small plots of corn and squash and chile, irrigated by acequias, the straight green rows defiant in the face of discount Walmart food. The same few surnames: Padilla, Martinez, Trujillo, Garcia. Marriage and intermarriage like shuffling the same deck of cards.
All this beauty. Also underfunded public schools, dry winters, a falling water table, shitty job prospects. Mostly what people have now is cheap heroin.
Anything that needs doing can be done better elsewhere.
She felt powerful, getting these guys—who’d once been so swaggering—naked, with their zitty backs and needy, nosing penises. They were pathetic in their grunting urgency and in those slack, defenseless minutes after.
These cells were the American Dream. They were the Sam Waltons of cells, the Starbucks, starting small and taking over vast swaths of territory, leaving destruction and foreclosures and empty storefronts in their wake.
For instance, wasn’t it amazing that during ovulation, women’s voices increased in pitch? And wasn’t it more amazing that when played audio recordings of women’s voices and asked to rank them by attractiveness, heterosexual men picked the ovulating woman?
Angel watches Lizette, who gazes out the window, conveying with her posture, her expression, her every cell, that nothing will make her ever care about anything, ever.
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deadbeat son who drinks too much and blames others for his life. But when his uncle suggests that he play the role of Jesus in the Easter processional, he buys in completely , even having them nail his hands to the cross. This turns out to be a bad idea more than a noble gesture. His daughter, Angel, has just shown up at his door, eights months pregnant and will need him to step up to a father role he has never previously assumed. This is a sad, realistic story of hard times, addiction, teen pregnancy, generational poverty-- a Grapes of Wrath for modern times. But like that classic there is still a chance to find some grace among these characters. Valdez evidently turned this New Yorker story into a fully developed novel and we are fortunate to experience a year in the life of this family. Highly recommend.Lines
The buttons of her jeans are unsnapped to make way for its fullness, and also to indicate how this happened in the first place.
Most of the families out here have been on the same land for hundreds of years. Trailers and newer cinderblock structures are wedged into yards alongside crumbling adobe ruins. Some families, like the Romeros, continue to farm small plots of corn and squash and chile, irrigated by acequias, the straight green rows defiant in the face of discount Walmart food. The same few surnames: Padilla, Martinez, Trujillo, Garcia. Marriage and intermarriage like shuffling the same deck of cards.
All this beauty. Also underfunded public schools, dry winters, a falling water table, shitty job prospects. Mostly what people have now is cheap heroin.
Anything that needs doing can be done better elsewhere.
She felt powerful, getting these guys—who’d once been so swaggering—naked, with their zitty backs and needy, nosing penises. They were pathetic in their grunting urgency and in those slack, defenseless minutes after.
These cells were the American Dream. They were the Sam Waltons of cells, the Starbucks, starting small and taking over vast swaths of territory, leaving destruction and foreclosures and empty storefronts in their wake.
For instance, wasn’t it amazing that during ovulation, women’s voices increased in pitch? And wasn’t it more amazing that when played audio recordings of women’s voices and asked to rank them by attractiveness, heterosexual men picked the ovulating woman?
Angel watches Lizette, who gazes out the window, conveying with her posture, her expression, her every cell, that nothing will make her ever care about anything, ever.
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LibraryThing member bookczuk
2022 pandemic read, community read. Walks the line of opposites: joy in sorrow, particularly, in relationships and personal growth (even in death.) Covers the cycle of one year, starting in the Lenten season, which ironically is starting here, now. (Ash Wednesday is tomorrow.) I’m still unpacking
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this one, though in my dreams last night, I wrote an eloquent and beautiful full review— which I don’t remember at all this morning. Sigh. Show Less
LibraryThing member mahsdad
8/10 (eBook) This one came on my radar thru a library program called Together We Read. Its an international program that hosts a digital book club. During the reading period, there were no holds and unlimited borrows no the book. So why not. It's the story of a lower middle class family, all with
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their own problems to deal with. The main character, Amadeo is chosen to portray Jesus Christ in the town's Passion of the Christ play. He's a out of work, struggling alcoholic, who lives with his ill mother, and his 16 yr old pregnant daughter. The passion play bookends the story, but it is primarily, I believe about all the wounds in their lives that they are struggling with. Its not necessarily a happy read, but it was a pretty good one. Show Less
LibraryThing member eas7788
Oh, what a wonderful book. It started off a little slowly, but I loved her use of place, of pov, of characterization. I loved watching these characters try to connect, watching them fail and try again. Watching how they formed and reformed family. How they could forgive. The only true weakness for
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me was the pov of Brinna. I see why it was there in terms of plot, but she added so little, and she faded away at the end. Angel's perspective of LIzette is brilliant. Show Less
LibraryThing member booklove2
I'm so appreciative that there are so many varied voices writing today, AND that I'm aware and conscious that these voices are there to be read. The more books the merrier. Also, that there are prizes out there like The Center For Fiction First Novel prize. This book was the winner of that prize in
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2021. Here is an in depth and detailed story of a struggling family in New Mexico. A string of many young parents mean the family consists of four generations within 55 years. Told from a handful of perspectives, three of them being three generations of the Padilla family. The writing is so immersed in the struggles of this family, it would be hard for them not to be so endearing. Angel is a pregnant teen faced with split parents, her dad having a case of arrested development. The title leads the reader to believe the book will be much more religious than it is, but it mostly seems to bookend the story. The book probably didn't need to be THIS long as it's focused on a few people, but the writing is so rich, yet breezy, making the reader fully invested in these characters. Show Less
LibraryThing member shazjhb
Amazing book. Very sad. Wonderful characters. Many things don’t work out but some things do.
LibraryThing member msf59
This engaging family drama focuses on a Hispanic family living in New Mexico and is centered around Amadeo Padilla, a 33 year layabout and his 15 year old pregnant daughter. They are all living with Amadeo’s mother, who is the only one working. Plenty of humor to be found here but just edgy
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enough to keep my interest throughout. Fans of Luis Albert Urrea should enjoy this novel. Show Less
Awards
Lambda Literary Award (Finalist — 2022)
Aspen Words Literary Prize (Longlist — 2022)
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction (Finalist — Fiction — 2022)
Center for Fiction First Novel Prize (Winner — 2021)
VCU Cabell First Novelist Award (Finalist — 2022)
BookTube Prize (Finalist — Fiction — 2022)
Maya Angelou Book Award (Finalist — 2022)
NPR: Books We Love (2021)
Notable Books List (Fiction — 2022)
Lariat Adult Fiction Reading List (Selection — 2022)
Chicago Public Library Best of the Best: Adults (Selection — 2021)
Language
Original language
English