The Wonders

Starred review from January 31, 2022
Spanish poet Medel’s remarkable English-language debut moves from Francoist Spain into the present day, tracing a family’s fractured ties over three generations. In 1969, María is forced to leave her hardscrabble Córdoba home when she gets pregnant by a married man at 16. After handing over infant Carmen to her family to care for, she moves to Madrid and makes do with backbreaking menial jobs. Her efforts to send money home while saving enough to bring the child to live with her fail, as do her attempts to forge a long-distance maternal bond. By the time she can afford to have Carmen join her in the 1980s, the teenager refuses. As a young woman, Carmen marries a restaurateur and raises her daughter, Alicia, in comfort until the crippling debts her husband’s incurred drive him to suicide and the family into poverty when Alicia is 13. Like María, Alicia moves to Madrid, where she drops out of school, enters a dull marriage, works dead-end jobs, and carries on a generally self-destructive lifestyle. She’s also haunted by dreams about her father’s death, which become stranger and more violent as time passes. She doesn’t want to know María, the grandmother she was told abandoned their family, while María has too little information to find Alicia on her own. By 2018, a women’s support group that María has helped build organizes a women’s march that crosses through Alicia’s neighborhood, increasing the chance their paths will cross. Arresting characterizations and vivid prose fuel Medel’s searing look at the impact gender, class, and financial hardships have on working-class Spanish women’s lives as the country is buffeted by wider cultural shifts. It adds up to a powerful story.

June 1, 2022

In 1969, Mar�a leaves her small town, and her child, behind to head to the city of Madrid. There she finds work, always taking care of others. Years later, Mar�a's granddaughter Alicia is unhappily married to a man always pressuring her to have children, go on bike rides, or act more like other couples they know, and she often seeks escape through encounters with random men. Then in 2018, Alicia finds herself working at a train station snack shop as women from around the country gather to protest the unfairness they face in work and life. This is a lyrical and beautifully written book that follows three generations of a family of working women, highlighting the struggles that women have always faced in a patriarchal society. Rebecca Gibel adds beauty to the book, which showcases the author's poetic writing. VERDICT A literary novel of international interest, this award-winning book from Spanish poet Medel (My First Bikini) provides an engaging look at the feminist movement from its beginning to the struggles of today.--Elyssa Everling

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Starred review from February 15, 2022
Prizewinning Spanish poet Medel's debut novel examines the lives of three generations of women in Madrid with an unsparing eye. A series of interlocking narratives about Mar�a, Carmen, and Alicia--all working-class women who find themselves in the capital city for varied reasons--the novel traces transformations in Spanish life, culture, and politics from the end of the Franco era to the 21st century. The lives of Medel's three protagonists, however, remain tied to their troubling economic circumstances, and a telling epigraph from Philip Larkin ("Clearly money has something to do with life") provides a clue to the direction the women's stories will take. A teenage pregnancy forces unmarried Mar�a out of her family's modest provincial home to the city, away from her baby, Carmen, and into a series of demanding, physically exhausting jobs. Carmen's apparently good fortunes turn after the suicide of her debt-burdened husband, and she and her school-age daughters struggle in the aftermath. Alicia, one of Carmen's daughters, is haunted by her father's death and floats through life with a lackluster retail job, stultifying marriage, and a habit of picking up random men for brief, distracting sexual encounters. Economic insecurity forces all three to compromise dreams and life choices, and some notes of their lives echo in the others (albeit in ways unrecognized by the women). The 2018 Women's March in Madrid frames the beginning and end points of the novel and allows Medel to bring some of her major players together on one stage even if they are acting in their own dramas. The translation from Spanish of Medel's unvarnished look at three constrained lives is unsentimental and direct. Money changes everything (if you can get your hands on it).

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Starred review from January 1, 2022
Medel's sensitive debut, charged with feminist insights but never losing sight of the particularities of its characters, weaves together the stories of two women whose deeper connection only becomes clear as the novel approaches its end. On March 8, 2018, when the International Women's Strike takes place in Spain, Maria and Alicia are both living in Madrid. Nearing 70, Maria has retired from her job as an office cleaner and has been politically involved for decades. Alicia, in her early thirties, works at a train station convenience store, dreams every night of her father's death by suicide, and staves off boredom by having sex with random men. Moving nimbly back and forth through time, from the sixties up until 2018, Spanish novelist Medel astutely examines the forces--political, economic, familial, and personal--that have shaped the two women's richly detailed lives. Though penned in by class and gender, often in ways they do not recognize, Maria and Alicia come across not as simple victims but as struggling survivors, still open to change.

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