The Five Wounds

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Quade, Kirstin, Adult Book / Fiction / General / Quade, Kirstin Valdez
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Pittsfield Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Quade, Kirstin	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Quade, Kirstin Valdez	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Quade, Kirstin Valdez	4-week checkout	Due 05-20-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Quade, Kirstin Valdez	4-week checkout	Due 05-18-2024

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

People making bad choices submitted by TeacherN on July 19, 2022, 11:42am Very well written but a bit too close to real life for me. Each character makes terrible choices. For that reason, it's very difficult to read.

Amazing but hard because it's accurate submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on August 10, 2023, 9:19am What a richly written book about a family that is falling apart. The circumstances broadly mimic the hard lives of my clients (across my lifetime of service work) enough that it actually took me two tries to get into the book, because I do enough of this work that it’s hard to spend my leisure time reading about the same hard things. The book is accurate, emotional, nuanced, and excellent for seeing that sometimes things don’t work because all the bits are intertwined, have history, involve lots of players, and no one single piece having support will just magically fix the whole. Alternating between first person perspectives was a brilliant way into this story, and gave readers necessary insight that enhanced every aspect of the novel.

I have an issue with the book’s resolution, though. After 395 pages of things going wrong for three different family members, Amadeo has a big thing go wrong (no content spoiler here), something changes, and we get 15 pages of how things are different for everyone. It’s unsatisfying. I want to know about the hard work of the changes, not “then a miracle happens.” To me, making the change IS the story, and that’s the thing that got the fewest pages.

The book is amazing, and probably especially for readers who haven’t experienced or don’t think about how hard it is to get out of multi-generational poverty, drug use, and the cycles that hold people down. Highly recommended.