The Threads of the Heart

Starred review from November 26, 2012
Spanning southern Spain to Algeria, this mythic family tale follows a roving band of women through the amazing story of magical seamstress Frasquita Carasco, who, among other miracles, uses her otherworldly powers to raise the dead. Thanks to a box containing arcane secrets passed down by her mother, Frasquita is capable of cryptic incantations that unleash primeval forces. Her daily life, however, is one of poverty and hardship. The family gambled away to a wealthy landowner by a reckless husband with a passion for cock fighting, Frasquita and her children eventually flee their miserable existence in a remote Spanish desert town, embarking on an odyssey across the mountains, where they take up with a band of revolutionaries. The multifaceted panoply of terrifying or inspiring characters who inhabit this harsh, mystical universe—from a crafty, pontificating pedophile who is also a skilled physician to a Catalan anarchist leader whose ravaged face Frasquita must reconstruct—are worthy of the very best of Márquez or even the darkest García Lorca. The author’s prose is perfectly calibrated, riffing seamlessly between the enchanting lyricism of Frasquita’s matrilineal clan and far more somber realities. Frasquita’s daughter, Angela, was born with chicken feathers and a voice that can stir clergymen into lustful passions or raise the downtrodden masses. Like the desert that occupies so much of Martinez’s mesmerizing narrative, the author’s prose is uncompromising, stark, and often brutal: “The people were roaring beneath the child’s voice, and the captain was asking his questions, and the guard was cutting Salvador’s face, gashing the cheeks, digging into the lines, attacking the muscle, widening the mouth, carving the features.” Recurring themes, like ostracism and social injustice—in short the intolerable atrocities perpetuated by human beings on their own kind—are deftly and fluently addressed throughout this sad and magnificent debut. Martinez has crafted a singular and engrossing masterpiece of magical realism that stretches even the virtually limitless boundaries of the genre.

December 15, 2012
Debut novelist Martinez attempts an ambitious tale about a woman who creates remarkable transformations with sewing materials, but the story unravels before the end. The narrative follows Frasquita, a folklike heroine who possesses a special gift. Like generations of women before her, she is gifted with mystical powers during a special ritual. Her ability to craft beautiful objects and to heal those who are broken is viewed with suspicion by the townspeople of Santavela, and many shun her as a sorceress. When Frasquita marries Jose, the wheelwright, the couple has five children and each possesses a unique quality. But Jose teeters back and forth between sanity and madness. At one point, he moves out of the house to live in the chicken coop with his beloved chickens; after returning to the family, he becomes obsessed with numbers and doesn't sleep for over a month. Frasquita is always there to help him back to normalcy. As other characters are introduced, the saga lengthens. Floating in and out of the village are Heredia, a young man who's inherited his father's olive grove; Lucia, the village whore and Frasquita's friend who marries the elder Heredia; Blanca, a midwife; and Eugenio, a man of sinister character who becomes the village healer for a small time. After a series of events, Frasquita gathers her children and begins an arduous journey that eventually takes them to Africa. As they travel, they meet a group of anarchists, and Frasquita saves the life of Salvador, their leader. She also has another daughter, Soledad, who narrates the winding tale. Though Martinez's prose is often moving and surprisingly lyrical, even during the goriest of moments, the story becomes frayed and somewhat disorganized as the author delves into excruciating minutiae about the lives of every character she introduces and every situation the family encounters. A three-part book that would have been more interesting without the extraneous details.

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January 1, 2013
Passed down from mother to daughter, a simple wooden box contains the unknown legacy of generations of women in Frasquita's family. When it is her turn to unearth the chest from its hiding place beneath gnarled olive trees, Frasquita discovers mere needles and threads, but these will be enough to cast her spell and seal the fate of herself and her children. A saint's heart, a feathered wedding dress, the coat of a local landowner: all will be enriched by Frasquita's mythical talents as she weaves an otherworldly wisdom and protection into the meager bits of fabric before her. Though men and beasts will be healed by her prowess, her skills may not be enough to protect her son and daughters as they travel from the mountains of war-torn Spain to the deserts of North Africa. Rich in seductive energy and teeming with lush imagery, Martinez's epic fable of misunderstood women struggling to survive in misguided societies is an evocative but cautionary tale of hubris and humility.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)