Review by Booklist Review
ldquo;WORK IN PARADISE" the notice declared, calling for laborers to come to Panama to build a canal. Word travels far and wide. Ada Bunting, a 16-year-old from Barbados, is lured there, anxious to earn money to help her ailing sister. Henríquez (The Book of Unknown Americans, 2014), of Panamanian descent, casts the disruptive and dangerous digging of the massive canal as a magnet that pulls together disparate characters. An American doctor hoping to eradicate malaria and his botanist wife move into a large house on a hill, where Ada, whose mother's story embodies the emotional reverberations of slavery in the Caribbean, finds work. A local, Omar Aquino, 17, raised by his ever-grieving widower father, a fisherman appalled by the invasion of foreigners and the raucous brutality of the "Cut," decides, nonetheless, to work on the canal and finds that, indeed, it is a hell of mud, rain, mosquitoes, racism, and tyranny. Valentina starts a grass-roots protest and healer Doña Ruiz observes all. Henríquez reveals the forgotten blood, sweat, and tears that made this engineering marvel possible, while dramatizing with tenderness, insight, and striking detail how "the great divide" not only split the land but also communities, families, culture, and a sense of wholeness. Though carrying heavy historical cargo, Henríquez's tale is beguiling and bright with love, humor, and magic. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Henríquez's long-awaited novel with its unusual and resounding historical setting will attract a wide readership.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The enthralling latest from Henríquez (The Book of Unknown Americans) tells the stories of migrant laborers, locals, and others affected by the Panama Canal project in 1907. Born and bred in Panama City, Francisco Aquino is a proud fisherman. His headstrong teenage son Omar yearns for more than his father's predictable life at sea, however, and gets hired at Culebra Cut, a notoriously difficult labor site, where he works to dig the canal alongside Barbadians, Jamaicans, and Haitians. Francisco, who calls the Americans "enemy invaders" for building the canal and harbors resentment over U.S. intervention in Panama's 1903 separatist movement, disapproves. There's also 16-year-old Ada Bunting, who arrives from Barbados to work as a washer woman so she can send money to help her sister, who has pneumonia. Her story is linked with that of Tennessee scientist John Oswald, who comes to Panama to study tropical diseases with his wife Marian, who contracts pneumonia and is cared for by Ada. Meanwhile, the residents of the southern town of Gatun learn that their community has been earmarked as the site of the canal's dam. The author delves deeply into themes of colonialism and labor exploitation, showing how the men take quinine daily to ward off tropical diseases while an American foreman rules over their worksite with an iron fist. Henríquez's pitch-perfect novel has the feel of a classic. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An anti-imperialist fairy tale about the building of the Panama Canal. Henríquez's novel begins in 1907, with work on the canal well underway, and reveals how its construction changes the lives of multiple characters of varying nationalities, classes, and races, each in Panama for their own reasons. Henríquez is skilled at juggling the many subplots. Among the central characters, Ada Bunting from Barbados is the stereotypical sentimental heroine. The biracial 16-year-old has come to Panama to earn money to save her ailing sister's life; she gets a job nursing the sick wife of wealthy, idealistic, but emotionally stunted malaria researcher John Oswald (whose under-explored complexity makes him one of the book's more interesting characters). Plucky Ada begins a tepid romance with young Panamanian Omar Aquino, whose broken relationship with his fisherman father Francisco exemplifies the divided loyalties and resentments of Panamanians treated as second-class citizens in their own country. Francisco sells to fishmonger Joaquín, whose wife ropes her husband into organizing a demonstration of passive resistance against Canal Commission orders to dismantle and move her entire hometown. A host of other characters are sketched in, from an Antiguan cook who undermines Ada to an inept French doctor, an intuitive palm reader, and a Barbadian sugar planter in love with Ada's mother but too weak-willed to fight for her. Along the way, Henríquez plugs in the history that many North Americans probably don't know: the Panamanian civil war and intervention by the United States, which paid the country, newly independent from Colombia, $10 million dollars for full control of the Canal Zone. The depiction of white North Americans and Caribbean planters as at best clueless, more often mercenary and cruelly racist, is undoubtedly accurate. Unfortunately, and despite Henríquez's lyrical prose, they never feel fully realized as individuals. Neither does virtuous Ada, the noble Panamanians, or Mrs. Oswald, a representative of white female victimhood who has sacrificed her intellectual ambition for a loveless marriage. Despite panoramic ambitions, the novel never quite catches fire. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
