The Wonders

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. (Mar.)