Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.
She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished and how they were threatened. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver on her own, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. “There is one every generation-a seer who keeps the stories.” Pick up this book and gift yourself the chance to read a genuinely remarkable novel! Her sentences sing and her grasp of character and atmosphere is vividly cinematic. Kali Fajardo-Anstine is quickly establishing herself as one of our modern masters. What do the leaves hold for us really? She faces that question boldly time and again and wins the reader over each time. At the center of it all, Luz is on a journey to see what is inside of herself as a young woman coming into her own. She sees halting progress, but also rising violence and social tensions. Over the many remarkable pages of this novel, Luz serves as a compelling witness to history unfolding in real time. Luz also possesses great tenacity and a profound connection to her ancestors. She is a young woman on the margins of the margins, living with her older brother and aunt and eking out a living as a laundress and occasional tea leaf reader. At the heart of this story is Luz “Little Light” Lopez.
Woman of Light, Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s dazzling debut novel, is a direct embodiment of this tradition and a gift to every reader enthralled by a good family saga.Ĭentered around three generations of the Lopez family, Woman of Light takes place primarily in 1930s Denver-a place and time where the west remained wild. They help light our way with the lessons of our past. In a very literal sense, they are our direct line to our history. Every family has that member, the one with the memory of an elephant, who with ease can recount generations’ worth of stories about the family tree (and its roots).
0 kommentar(er)
