The Great Divide by Cristina Henriquez

This is a book set in Panama at the time that the Panama Canal is being built--ironically the canal that connect two oceans and changed ocean navigation is imperiled by changing climate and conditions, but here we go back to it's inception, which is gritty but also a predictable colonial New World story. The year is 1907 and Ada Bunting has bravely set off alone from her home in Barbados for Panama, hoping to find work that will earn her enough money to pay for the surgery her sister desperately needs. While she’s heard that wages are high in the bustling company towns erected to support the building of the massive canal, she quickly learns there’s an order here—Gold for the Americans, Silver for everyone else—one of many divides that rest largely on the color of your skin. Omar Aquino has also sought work on the canal. He’s one of the few native Panamanians employed there and has joined the digging not for the money but to escape the loneliness of a life spent watching his fisherman father sail out each morning. And so he finds himself in a throng of men opening the earth. This gives rise to the second divide in the novel, between Omar and his father, who has refused to speak to his son since he began work in the Cut. A chance encounter between these two leads Ada into the employ of John Oswald, who has come to Panama with the grand ambition of curing malaria and finds himself in need of a nurse girl to care for his ailing wife. Ironically, Marian Oswald is not suffering from the malaria that her husband hopes to use to secure his legacy, but common pneumonia, a disease she might’ve just as easily contracted back home in the Smokey Mountains. In John and Marian’s marriage another divide emerges, as Marian’s own scientific ambitions and passion for botany slowly disappear in her husband’s shadow. Within these three life stories we learn how it was for those living in Panama during this epic build, the haves and the have nots, and what some of their stories might have been.