Happy Wednesday everyone! Woah. Today is the last Wednesday of March. How time flies! In a couple of days, we will be welcoming a new month and the second quarter of the year. How has your year been so far? I hope that it has been great. I also hope and pray that the rest of the year will be brimming with good news, positive energy, and blessings. I also hope that everyone will be happy and healthy, in body, mind, and spirit.

Wednesdays also mean WWW Wednesday updates. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme hosted originally by SAM@TAKING ON A WORLD OF WORDS. The mechanics for WWW Wednesday are quite simple, you just have to answer three questions:

  1. What are you currently reading?
  2. What have you finished reading?
  3. What will you read next?
www-wednesdays
What are you currently reading?

For March, I resolved to read works written by female writers. This is to commemorate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day on March 8. The last time I hosted a similar theme for a reading month was back in March 2022. This journey has been scintillating as it brought me to different parts of the world, except perhaps Europe and Africa. I am changing that with my next read, Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price. It was in 2021 when I read my first novel by the Nigerian writer, The Joys of Motherhood, a book that pleasantly surprised me. It also made me look forward to reading more of Emecheta’s work. I have quite some expectations of The Bride Price. As I have yet to read the book, I can’t share some of my impressions as of now. I might share my impressions of the book in this week’s First Impression Friday update; that is if I have not yet finished the book.

What have you finished reading?

After a slow week, I again started gathering steam as I was able to complete three books in the past week. The first of which was Joyce Carol Oates’ them which transported me to North America. This is my first novel by the prolific American writer although I have been looking forward to exploring her oeuvre; she has been a recurring presence in discourses for possible Nobel Laureate in Literature. I obtained a copy of them during the 2018 Big Bad Wolf Sale. It was for this reason that I added the book to my 2024 Beat the Backlist Challenge. It is also part of my 2024 Top 24 Reading List. This makes it the first and seventh book, respectively, from the said reading challenges.

Winner of the National Book Award, them is the third of thematically interconnected novels collectively referred to as the Wonderland Quartet. Set in Detroit, the novel charted the fortunes of Loretta and her children Jules and Maureen progressively across the decades, starting in the 1930s. Jules, whose father was fatally shot by Loretta’s brother Brock, was Loretta’s only son and the eldest of the siblings. Meanwhile, Maureen and her sister Betty were Loretta’s children with Howard Wendall, a cop. Jules was skirting danger as he got involved with petty theft. When Howard died, Loretta remarried. To run the household, Loretta relied on Maureen who, in turn, yearned for escape. To build an escape fund, Maureen turned to prostitution. But while the family is shadowed by darkness, they strive hard to break away from their destructive and crime-ridden background. There are several layers to the story but it was palpable how the characters were all yearning to capture that American dream. What makes the novel a compelling read is its incisive and cynical view of American society.

Like them, Isabel Allende’s Of Love and Shadows is one of the 24 books I included in my 2024 Top 24 Reading List; I have, without design, been ticking off books from this list as early as now. All the better for me, I guess, as I won’t be cramming toward the end of the year. Anyway, I was planning to read Of Love and Shadows last year but the Chilean writer published a new work that I prioritized. This is my fifth book by Allende but just the second from the earlier phase of her career. I have to establish this because her more recent works had minimal elements of magical realism than her earlier works.

Originally published in Spanish in 1984 as De amor y de sombra, it is Allende’s sophomore novel. Of Love and Shadows is set in an unnamed country but it does not take rocket science to figure out that the novel was set in Chile. At the heart of the story was magazine editor Irene Beltrán who was born into an affluent family and was engaged to Army Captain Gustavo Morante. Her life, as she knew it, started to unravel with her encounter with photographer Francisco Leal. The crux of the story was the pair traveled to the countryside village of Los Riscos to cover the supernatural powers of Evangelina Ranquileo. News of her healing powers drew in people from different parts of the region but when Irene and Francisco arrived at the Ranquileo home, they found that the army had arrived too. This had brutal implications as the story was set during the authoritarian regime. The novel was based on Allende’s journalistic endeavors and was also based on actual historical events that exposed the atrocities of the Pinochet regime. Of Love and Shadows was not as engaging as The House of the Spirits but it was still a riveting read about one of the darkest phases of contemporary Chilean history.

For the third consecutive book, I am stuck in the American continent. While them was set in the north and Of Love and Shadows was set in the south, Cristina Henríquez’s latest novel The Great Divide transported me to the Isthmus of Panama in Central America. Before this year, I have never heard of Henríquez nor have I encountered any of her works. However, her third novel has been listed as one of the books to look forward to in 2024. It was a no-brainer for me to include it in my 2024 Top 10 Books I Look Forward to List; this is the second book from the list I read.

The novel transports the readers to the early 20th century. Following Panama’s independence from Colombia, the United States did not waste time in striking a deal with the newly-born nation. The deal involved building a canal that connects the Atlantic and the Pacific. The new project brought in laborers and dreamers from the Caribbean and other parts of Central America. It was their stories that Henríquez gave voices to. She introduced a diverse cast of characters – with emphasis on Ada Bunting and Omar Aquino – whose individual threads converged in Panama, each driven by a dream. However, the environment was hostile. Malaria, yellow fever, pneumonia, and even depression affected the population. The smell of death pervaded the air. The novel also underlined the gaps between the various social classes. The same gap was also palpable between the US officials and the laborers. With this in mind, one can glean that the book’s title is also allegorical. Overall, The Great Divide was an interesting story about men and women whose voices were lost to the tumult of history.

What will you read next?