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.
In three parts that unfold over the course of a year in the aptly named New Mexico town of Las Penas, The Five Wounds is a knife-sharp study of what happens to a family when accountability to other people goes out the window. Quade’s characters are experts at pushing love away, especially when intimate connection is most necessary ... As each member of the Padilla family battles their personal demons, hope shimmers like a mirage over everyday life, a sweet what-if that Quade expertly suspends above the text ... it is a treat to see the author’s exceptional command of pacing on display in a novel. Proof that what you say is just as important as how you say it, her precise lines are wanting in neither substance nor style, and her darkly hilarious, tender, gorgeous use of language is one of the crowning pleasures of the novel ... an irreverent 21st-century meditation on the restorative powers of empathy.
Like her stories, the novel is sheathed in sensate layers of the Northern New Mexico landscape — the personal and social unrest that simmers in the Land of Enchantment, home of the author’s heart.
Quade delivers on the promise of her debut collection ... Her sinewy sentences and emotional daring astound ... the novel's vibrant sheen masks deeper, darker currents. Birth—and rebirth—balance against death like yin and yang. Quade glides elegantly across a silken tightrope between comedy and tragedy, twists of fate that buoy her narrative to its resonant conclusion. The Five Wounds is destined to be one of this year's most celebrated works of fiction. Quade is a writer on the move.
