This beautiful, immersive book is everything you could want from historical fiction. Straddling geographic and social divides with aplomb, Henriquez gives us a collage of characters for whom the Panana Canal upended both lives and landscape in the United States’s pursuit of what they consider “progress.” The stakes are personal—we know the Canal will be built—and the impending losses we know are coming allow the characters’ major and minor heartbreaks to take center stage.
The Great Divide by Cristina Henriquez, (List Price: $30, Ecco, 9780063291324, March 2024)
Reviewed by Leah Jordan, Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville, Arkansas