Novelist Esmeralda Santiago never dreamed she’d create, much less learn to love, a character who owns slaves, said Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today. Then into her head stepped Ana Cubillas, who became the willful heroine of Conquistadora, a book that Publishers Weekly has called a “Puerto Rican Gone With the Wind.” Ana, who grows up in 19th-century Seville reading about the lives of the Spanish conquistadores, ends up the widowed owner of a Puerto Rican sugar plantation. Santiago felt she had no choice but to see the story through. “When you consider the situation I put Ana in, she’d have to be a slave owner,” Santiago says. “I had to get over myself. I had to consider what could make a person live with something like that.”
Ana isn’t the typical plantation owner, said Gaiutra Bahadur in The New York Times. Though she metes out floggings, she’s not inured to the cruelty of the act. “She felt it, even if she wouldn’t sacrifice her own ambitions to change their circumstances,” says the author. Ana bristles when Spanish authorities issue a proclamation, taken directly from history, whose stated aim is to combat “the ferocity of the stupid African race.” Says Santiago, “I was chilled when I read it.” Ultimately, the author grew to admire her character’s toughness, a trait she drew from when she suffered a stroke two years into writing Conquistadora. “Something that’s life-threatening makes you more tenacious to finish what you start,” she says. “There’s a lot of Ana in me, and me in Ana.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”