Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the story of a multi-generational Chicano family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The setting is the Lost Territory and Denver, Colorado. The narrative unfolds in separate threads with alternating settings and time periods. It focuses on Luz Lopez, “Little Light,” a tea leaf reader and laundress as she struggles with her aunt and brother to eke a living in a Denver teeming with racial discrimination, oppression, and harassment.
The narrative opens with the unceremonious abandonment of Luz’s grandfather, Pidre. Abandoned as a baby in 1868 in the Lost Territory, he is found and raised by an elderly woman, known as Sleepy Prophet. Pidre lives with her until he is old enough to make his own way in the world. The narrative switches to Luz Lopez in Denver, 1933. From then on, the narrative alternates between Pidre and Luz in the form of flashbacks and flash forwards, revealing the background of each character and developing each thread separately. The threads coalesce at the end of the novel when Luz decides to share her dreams of a sleepy prophet with her young niece.
Fajardo-Anstine immerses the reader in early 20th Century Denver with its racist history, its Ku Klux Klan rallies, and its rampant police brutality and violence against the indigenous population. Luz navigates her life through this turmoil. She experiences visions and prescient dreams, which she struggles to decipher. And she develops a reputation as a gifted reader of tea leaves. When her brother is run out of town, she takes a job as the assistant of a local attorney who advocates for the rights of the indigenous population. She gets embroiled in a love triangle between her boss and a local musician.
The chapters recounting Luz’s story are not told chronologically. And since her chapters also alternate between chapters recounting the story of her grandparents, the narrative feels like it is constantly interrupted. Following the different threads and time lines poses a challenge intensified by the absence of a connection between the disparate threads until late in the novel.
Fajardo-Anstine’s prose can be quite breathtaking at times. Her use of metaphors can be highly effective in creating the setting and in capturing the suffocating atmosphere experienced by her characters. Her characters are compelling, especially Luz as she struggles to find her place in the world. The plot has potential, but Fajardo-Anstine’s treatment with its alternating threads is jarring. Switching from one narrative thread to another and from one timeline to another confuse and detract from what would otherwise have been a much stronger novel.