This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.
My grandmother was the family genealogist. The bulk of her research centered our most prominent ancestors, who were members of the ill-fated Donner Party. The horrors that my great-great-great-grandmother endured while emigrating to California are well-documented, and together my grandmother and I hunted for accounts in used bookstores all across the West. But then there’s a gap: I know nothing about the following generation; my knowledge of the family history picks up with my great-grandfather in Minnesota in the early twentieth century. How the family line got from point A to point C is a mystery to me, and Grandma isn’t around to ask any longer.
For most of my life, that gap hadn’t bothered me, but as my thinking about the transference of generational pain has developed, I now wish I could better connect those dots.
As my thinking about the transference of generational pain has developed, I now wish I could better connect those dots.
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Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s much-anticipated debut novel
Woman of Light (the follow-up to her National Book Award-finalist story collection
Sabrina & Corina) centers on a protagonist with similar gaps of knowledge in her family history. The novel follows Luz, a young woman living in Denver in the 1930s who is able to read tea leaves. Visons and sensations come to her, but none so clear as to answer all her questions.
Luz’s family is literally from The Lost Territory, the portion of Mexico ceded to the United States after the Mexican-American War, and what life was like for them is largely unknown to her, until her visions start to reveal more and more.
Of course, although
Woman of Light is a novel about the past’s impact on the present, it isn’t backwards-looking. Rather, the predominant experience of reading the book is to be immersed in a present made intensely vibrant by Fajardo-Anstine’s lush prose. Luz’s world — her family, her romantic life, and her desire to do good for her community — is appropriately bright, and despite numerous blind spots and mistakes, Luz is anything but lost. Readers will be grateful to have found her.
Check out the rest of our Picks of the Month.