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A review by lydialovestoread
The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez
3.0
In short, this is a fictional story of the people adjacent to the building of the Panama Canal.
I counted 6 different story lines woven within this book! There is a family being misplaced because the canal is going through their neighborhood. There’s a girl who travels to the area to make money from the economic boom. There is this girl’s backstory that includes enslavement and an affair between her mother and the slave owner. The girl finds work with a rich family and that storyline. There’s a Panamanian boy who chooses to dig, his father’s disappointment and their backstory, and several others.
I learned a bit about the dig and the political tension it created, but mostly I felt lost in the tangle of stories. It took me about 3/4 of the book to really get into it, sort everyone out and cheer for the characters but up until then it felt like a slog. Even at the end I didn’t feel like things were fully resolved.
Just okay. If I wasn’t reading it for a book club I probably wouldn’t have finished.
I counted 6 different story lines woven within this book! There is a family being misplaced because the canal is going through their neighborhood. There’s a girl who travels to the area to make money from the economic boom. There is this girl’s backstory that includes enslavement and an affair between her mother and the slave owner. The girl finds work with a rich family and that storyline. There’s a Panamanian boy who chooses to dig, his father’s disappointment and their backstory, and several others.
I learned a bit about the dig and the political tension it created, but mostly I felt lost in the tangle of stories. It took me about 3/4 of the book to really get into it, sort everyone out and cheer for the characters but up until then it felt like a slog. Even at the end I didn’t feel like things were fully resolved.
Just okay. If I wasn’t reading it for a book club I probably wouldn’t have finished.