The ObserverFictionReviewA debut novel set in 1930s Denver blends the colonial past with a dangerous present in a feat of old-school storytelling
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut novel is set in 1930s Denver, Colorado, a teeming city built on the exploits of white colonial settlers and the erasure of Indigenous American lands, histories and societies. Its heroine is Luz Lopez, who must struggle to survive despite a traumatic past, a dangerous present and an unknown future.
Fajardo-Anstine describes Denver with a pleasing solidity, its shops, bars and carnivals and small bands of enemies and allies carrying a detailed everyday heft. She offers a fascinatingly rich setting that depicts American western self-mythologisation in the making, when the victors of history are secure enough that the murals in the local courthouse “depicted covered wagons, miners panning for gold, an abundance of white men coming to the land”.
Fajardo-Anstine is brilliant at evoking the everyday resilience of people carrying centuries of history in their soulsThe prose weakens when reaching for a certain classic register. There are unnecessary Reader’s Digest novel-like chapter headings: The Body Snatchers of Bakersfield, California; The Sleepy Prophet and the Child From Nowhere. The same happens with attempts at overly poetic writing, as when describing “the room, its uneasiness, a bleach-like sadness’’, a woman who “fainted, her eyelids fluttering between the waking world and the place she had gone” or a woman who “had a dazed look, as if she’d walked into her own birthday party expecting a wake”.
There is no need for such try-hard phrases, as the raw stuff of Fajardo-Anstine’s world is so fascinating. When it isn’t straining for similes and metaphors, the writing becomes easy and muscular: “the city had pace, a feeling”, a character feels “as if the land was family” while “rail yards and coal smelters coughed exhaust, their soot raining into the South Platte river”.
Fajardo-Anstine is brilliant at evoking the everyday resilience of people carrying centuries of history in their souls in a charged present day that offers advancement and change alongside violence and insult. Luz, her family and friends fight to survive in a teeming, multiracial but divided city, haunted by their lost, colonised, stolen and occupied lands, wary of white people whose currency was “marked with blood”, betrayal and exploitation. There is a truly shocking scene of a Ku Klux Klan rally of men, women and children, “their painted hoods bobbing along the horizon”. By the time it winds down, Woman of Light achieves something very satisfying as a soapy, immersive saga – a feat of old-school storytelling.
Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine is published by Little, Brown (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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