Conquistadora is many vivid things all at once, and for the reader, they happen in your body, imagination and soul. It’s a swashbuckling adventure, visceral and ardent; it’s a historical novel so seamlessly told that you don’t realize your heart’s pounding even as your brain’s amassing a wealth of fascinating new knowledge. This is a book that is like that one small island you’ve been longing for since the great adventure and pirate stories of childhood. But the island is real, and this novel tells a real story--an important piece of history--that has never been told before. It’s a story about Puerto Rico, Esmeralda Santiago’s birthplace, and it shows us the island in a way that we’ve never seen before.
Here also is a portrait of characters I came to know and to care about, far from the usual New World stock cast of rapacious and greedy Spanish plantation owners chasing after slave and Creole girls. I was especially intrigued from the start by Ana, whom we first meet as a teenager in a convent in Seville in 1826, bent over the yellowing pages of some journals. (I have an established proclivity for historical novels that begin in convents!) Ana’s story, as every feisty convent girl’s life story should, begins and ends with rebellion: those journals belong to an ancestor of hers who journeyed to Puerto Rico with Ponce de Leon, and when Ana travels there just after her eighteenth birthday, she is a señorita de buena familia rebelling against expectations--of her class, her gender, and the time period. By 1865, she’s rich: a wealthy plantation owner on the island. She’s lost none of her fire. But when the slaves on whom her sugarcane business was built catch the winds of change when Lincoln is elected in the US, she may lose it all. In the decades in between, Ana loves and loses, and finds her true home and her destiny. Puerto Rico, like many tropical “paradises,” turns out to be not the fantasy she’d dreamed on, but a harsh land with harsh realities--a place that rewards only the toughest. The surprising Ana is an irresistible heroine despite the history she carries. She is a woman of her time, for good or ill. A woman who by the end of this sweeping story, comes to define her life not just by all that she has conquered but also all that she has lost. Most importantly, she lives in the reader’s imagination.
Conquistadora is a novel that surpassed my every expectation. It brings a hitherto unknown swath of history alive through great storytelling and narrative verve.
Esmeralda Santiago has written a brilliant and blazingly alive novel, as engrossing and just plain fun as any I have read in a long while.
Author: Esmeralda Santiago
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Knopf (July 12, 2011)
Media type: Hardcover, Audio Book, Kindle
Pages: 432 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0307268327
Publication date: 12 July 2011
Reader Review
Page-Turner
Born in a time when ladies of Spain's high society are expected to be prim and proper, petite main character Ana is an unwelcome force of nature. So unwelcome that her parents abscond her to a convent school (where she meets her best friend and lover, the angelic Elena) and her grandparent's estate (where the history of her ancestors sets her mind and passions on fire).
To Ana, the future is a prison of corsets, parlor halls, and disapproving glances. She hatches a desperate - yet adventuresome - plan to secure her freedom. But to make things work, Ana has to give up bigger and bigger pieces of her soul until the admirably headstrong young girl becomes a cold and twisted warden-- to her husband, her plantation slaves, and ultimately even herself.
Starting with a brief look at the indigenous Boricuas of Puerto Rico and ending with the impact of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Santiago seamlessly blends history throughout the story. My husband and I found CONQUISTADORA to be a true page-turner.
The book is not without its flaws, however: Santiago sometimes abruptly introduces a new point of view for reasons that become apparent only much later (or sometimes not at all). While her extensive character biographies are always interesting from a historic perspective, they are strangely lacking in character development.
The main characters are either irredeemably flawed or underdeveloped. While I found myself vested in knowing what happened next, if you need someone to root for, this book may not be for you. Some people have been bothered by the "magic realism" in the latter half of the book, but to me it seemed true to life that the characters would believe that one of the slaves would be a seer.
Finally, a warning for anyone with delicate sensibilities. The pages are full of gruesome deaths from accidents, murders, and an epidemic. There is also prostitution, incest and a historically accurate but completely disconcerting amount of adultery and rape.
Despite these weaknesses, CONQUISTADORA is a compelling look at a complex and under-studied time of Puerto Rican -- and at what might happen when a desperate person allows herself to be completely selfish. I recommend it highly.
- by E. Kennen
Great Novel of a Flawed Heroine
The most cliché ridden reviews always contain the phrase `sweeping epic'... so imagine how embarrassed I am to begin this review by stating that this is very much a sweeping epic. My apologies.
I feel as if I just spent several days in the sweltering heat and dangerous surroundings of a sugar plantation in Puerto Rico in the middle of the nineteenth century. The writing is lush and evocative and yet words are used sparingly, no pages of chatter describing every leaf and sunset. Very admirable in a novel of this depth. Even more admirable is the unflinching view of how that sugar was harvested and the human toll such an endeavor was thought of as necessary. These people aren't cardboard cutouts that always do the right thing or even the smart thing. It gives an insight into what these plantation owners told themselves to continue demeaning and abusing their slaves, the rationalizations of how they were actually helping them, not hurting them. Though of course there are the characters that simply don't care. And yet, they knew the day would come when everything would change and feared it. Rightly so in fact. People with nothing to lose can be dangerous indeed.
It's not an easy book to read full of suffering and tragedy but I was mesmerized and glad to see a peek into an unfamiliar culture. Much of the historical fiction I've read happens in Europe or America. It was great to see a novel use a different culture. I did stumble a bit over the occasional passages written in what I assume is Spanish but not enough to throw me out of the story and usually the words or sentences are explained in English without resorting to dry interpretations.
The story is far from over and I'm looking forward to more and hope it comes soon.
- by Kindred "In All But Spirit"
Intense and engaging but not sure I enjoyed the experience.
Intense is one word for this book. I found myself unable to put it down, although it was affecting me emotionally such that I actually became melancholy. The story is primarily that of Ana, a strong-willed woman who is willing to do what it takes to do what she wants - reminiscent to me of Scarlett O'Hara. Like Scarlett, she feels a deep and abiding attachment to her land - in this case, the land that her ancestors "conquered", not one where she lived. Her imagination spurred on by reading the stories of the conquest of the Western Hemisphere, she finds a way to escape the vise-like grip of Spanish society to settle in Puerto Rico. There she finds life is not as luxurious as she hopes - the Hacienda is decaying, its lands reverting to nature, its trapiche falling apart. Quite unlike the lady she was raised to be, she hardens herself physically and emotionally to take on the challenge of creating her dream - a successful Hacienda. However, she must face all the political and social challenges of the day, including slavery.
The story is also an unusual romance, but not your typical romance where one woman loves one man. Rather there are multiple men and women in this story, and their loves for eachother tell part of the tale, but as I said, Ana is the main focus - her thread alone is woven into the tale from beginning to end. That said, the story does flip to different perspectives so that we see the inner workings of each character.
The essence of slavery - and class - are explored intimately in this book, in such a way that one understands both how people allowed slavery to exist, but also why it was - and is - incredibly wrong.
At a few times, I found the main character un-relatable. For example, her lack of connection to her own son - as a new mother myself with a close and loving relationship with my son, it was hard to reconcile her disconnection. Likewise, the way that she de-prioritizes love through her life - while a valid choice - is not something I could relate to. I would be working throughout life to have both love and "career success" you might call it in my life together rather than sacrificing one. But it was a different time and in both these cases I have to understand that the woman made different choices than I would have and probably for very good reasons.
There was one thing that was never resolved for me. There is an ambitious character called Severo. Somehow he always seemed to be near when harm came to others, especially when that harm could have benefited him. However, the author portrayed him in a sympathetic way at times and never settled the question whether he was involved. I ended the book still quite curious on that fact.
- by Shannon B Davis "Nepenthe"
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