The title refers to the constructing of the Panama Canal, and Christina Henriquez’s newest novel describes a number of characters directly or indirectly involved in it. John Oswald is a scientist and he and his wife, Marian, leave their home in Tennessee so he can try to solve the mosquito/malaria problem. Ada has left her home in Barbados and sneaks aboard a ship bound for Panama. She hopes to make enough money there, so her sister can have a life saving operation. Omar has taken on the dirty, exhausting job as a digger much to his father’s dismay. Valentina’s childhood home will be moved along with the whole neighborhood because a dam must be erected there. She thinks there is a way to prevent this.

There are too many characters with their back stories for a book of this size. Just when I was getting into Ada’s story, her story line would stop and the novel would begin to describe the death of Omar’s mother. Although The Great Divide brought up some interesting dilemmas about the digging of the canal, it required more pages to flesh out the characters and illustrate what is involved in the making of the Panama Canal.