Kali Fajardo-Anstine

"1890: When Desiderya Lopez, The Sleepy Prophet, finds an abandoned infant on the banks of an arroyo, she recognizes something in his spirit and brings him home. Pidre will go on to become a famous showman in the Anglo West whose main act, Simodecea, is Pidre's fearless, sharpshooting wife, who wrangles bears as part of his show. 1935: Luz "Little Light" Lopez and her brother Diego work the carnival circuit in downtown Denver. Luz, is a tea leaf reader, and Diego is a snake charmer. One day, a pale-faced woman in white fur asks Luz for a reading, calling her by a name that only her brother knows. Later that night at a party downtown, Luz sees Diego dancing with this pale-faced woman, which results in a brawl with the local white supremacist group. Diego leaves town for cover and Luz is left trying to get justice for her brother and family. Merging two multi-generational storylines in Colorado, this is a novel of family love, secrets, and survival. With Fajardo-Anstine's immense capacity to render characters and paint vivid life, set against the Sange de Cristo mountians, Woman of Light is full of the weight, richness, and complexities of mixed blood and mica clay. It delights like an Old Western, and inspires the hope embedded in histories yet-told"--

A Novel

Woman of Light

Emiley Jones

The mountains were permanent yet shifting, ancient though young, their white peaks reminding Luz of gray hairs while their aspen groves resembled veins. Luz felt partly made of mountains, as if the land was family.

She found it odd how people sometimes said they had lost a person, as if death was some kind of misplacement of the soul, like an absent sock or an errant hairpin.

Lindsay

In the fields, every hello possessed within itself a farewell. People were as transient as the crops, picked and packaged, shipped afar, feeding the mouths of families Diego would never see.

“I think everything that’s ever happened or going to happen to us and the people we love is around,” said Luz. “All we have to do is reach for it.”

“I thought today would feel different. But I’m still just me. I mean, now I’m going to have my own life, my own little family someday. I thought it would take longer. When I was a little girl, it seemed so far away. Everything seemed so far away. And now we’re here, and that’s all behind us.” 

Luz thought on this. She said, “Sometimes when I’m reading tea leaves or daydreaming, I see things so clearly, from anywhere in time. It’s like we aren’t far away from anything at all.”

It wasn’t that Maria Josie believed a man could protect them any more than she could, but the image of a man served a purpose, just as those wooden painted owls perched along the fire escape. A scarecrow, that was all. Because of this, Maria Josie had to be very careful with her selection. “You cannot trust a man,” she explained to Luz. “Nearly all have some kind of deficiency, some malformation. They’ve been hurt a lot, menfolk, but they do most of the hurting, too.”

Anglos were perhaps the most dangerous storytellers of all— for they believed only their own words, and they allowed their stories to trample the truths of nearly every other man on Earth.

Pidre came from storytelling people, but as he passed a big top devoted to the reenactment of Custer's Last Stand, he couldn't help but think that Anglos were perhaps the most dangerous storytellers of all—for they believed only their own words, and they allowed their stories to trample the truths of nearly every other man on Earth.

HanaKyle Moranz

I wasn’t sure at first but I kept at it and loved this book! Highly recommend.

Woman of Light is a moving, far-reaching family saga that brilliantly showcases the hardships facing the Indigenous and Latinx communities in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  I was enraptured by the writing, the characters, the hints of magical realism, and the deeper historical context this gave me for a period I thought I knew well.  Fajardo-Anstine managed to pack an incredibly rich, emotional, sprawling story into a remarkably short, tight package.

This is, at its core, the story of Luz Lopez, the eponymous woman of light.  Luz is seventeen going on eighteen when we meet her.  She and her older brother, Diego, are using their gifts for reading tea leaves and performing with rattlesnakes, respectively, to bring in a little extra income for themselves and their aunt Maria Josie, the woman who took them in when they were very young.  Denver in the 1930s is not a friendly place for people of their heritage, and it’s not an easy economy for anyone.  Things are very tight, but they have their small apartment and their community and each other.  Most of the narrative follows Luz as she transitions into womanhood, while we learn about her family’s history periodically through her story.

While I was entranced by the story of Pidre, the foundation of the Lopez family, I became disenchanted with the story of Luz, our main protagonist, the further along the story progressed.  She went from being someone who made things happen to someone who just let life happen to her, which was an incredibly frustrating change to witness.  Pidre, on the other hand, was a wonderful character, and I could have happily read an entire book about him instead.

I loved the subtleties of this story.  The mistreatment people of color suffered during the time periods covered in this book was blatant and informative, but there were some other deep topics that were addressed in quieter ways.  Cycles of trauma for instance, and how radically different people who experience the same trauma can respond to it.  There was an underlying discourse about love in all its forms, and how true romantic love can differ widely from person to person, relationship to relationship, and how often one can misread their own feelings.  There were also some lovely inclusions of magical realism, from the more blatant magic of Luz’s reading of tea leaves to the more subtle way Diego handled and befriended snakes.

There are certain choices that I never understand, and one of those was made close to the end of this novel.  It was this decision that ushered in the chaos and heartache that followed.  I was so frustrated by this, because the situation was entirely avoidable.  In fact, I was so irritated by this turn of events and how the story wrapped up that I found my entire experience with the book retroactively soured.  Not completely, mind you, but enough to knock a full star off of my rating.

Woman of Light wasn’t perfect, but it was beautiful anyway.  I feel like I learned a lot without feeling like I was being preached at, which can be a difficult balance to strike.  It made me thirsty for more sprawling family stories, which isn’t a type of book I generally crave.  While the ending fell apart a bit for me, I’m very glad to have read this.

Celeste Richardson

Woman of Light is a moving, far-reaching family saga that brilliantly showcases the hardships facing the Indigenous and Latinx communities in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  I was enraptured by the writing, the characters, the hints of magical realism, and the deeper historical context this gave me for a period I thought I knew well.  Fajardo-Anstine managed to pack an incredibly rich, emotional, sprawling story into a remarkably short, tight package.

This is, at its core, the story of Luz Lopez, the eponymous woman of light.  Luz is seventeen going on eighteen when we meet her.  She and her older brother, Diego, are using their gifts for reading tea leaves and performing with rattlesnakes, respectively, to bring in a little extra income for themselves and their aunt Maria Josie, the woman who took them in when they were very young.  Denver in the 1930s is not a friendly place for people of their heritage, and it’s not an easy economy for anyone.  Things are very tight, but they have their small apartment and their community and each other.  Most of the narrative follows Luz as she transitions into womanhood, while we learn about her family’s history periodically through her story.

While I was entranced by the story of Pidre, the foundation of the Lopez family, I became disenchanted with the story of Luz, our main protagonist, the further along the story progressed.  She went from being someone who made things happen to someone who just let life happen to her, which was an incredibly frustrating change to witness.  Pidre, on the other hand, was a wonderful character, and I could have happily read an entire book about him instead.

I loved the subtleties of this story.  The mistreatment people of color suffered during the time periods covered in this book was blatant and informative, but there were some other deep topics that were addressed in quieter ways.  Cycles of trauma for instance, and how radically different people who experience the same trauma can respond to it.  There was an underlying discourse about love in all its forms, and how true romantic love can differ widely from person to person, relationship to relationship, and how often one can misread their own feelings.  There were also some lovely inclusions of magical realism, from the more blatant magic of Luz’s reading of tea leaves to the more subtle way Diego handled and befriended snakes.

There are certain choices that I never understand, and one of those was made close to the end of this novel.  It was this decision that ushered in the chaos and heartache that followed.  I was so frustrated by this, because the situation was entirely avoidable.  In fact, I was so irritated by this turn of events and how the story wrapped up that I found my entire experience with the book retroactively soured.  Not completely, mind you, but enough to knock a full star off of my rating.

Woman of Light wasn’t perfect, but it was beautiful anyway.  I feel like I learned a lot without feeling like I was being preached at, which can be a difficult balance to strike.  It made me thirsty for more sprawling family stories, which isn’t a type of book I generally crave.  While the ending fell apart a bit for me, I’m very glad to have read this.

Francine Corry

Abigail F

Jen Harris

Vanessa Scott

Amanda Rios

Francesca Starecheski

Kaycee

A dazzling epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award Finalist Sabrina & Corina “There is one every generation—a seer who keeps the stories.” 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. As Luz navigates 1930’s Denver on her own, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion. 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. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love, filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz.

Woman of Light A Novel

Reviews

Highlights