One wishes there was more of her because, unlike Allende, Zarité is under no mission to show us how much she knows. More than merely lyrical, they map around rhythms and spirits, making her as much conduit as storyteller. Yet even in the new city, Zarité can't quite free herself from the island, and the people alive and dead that have followed her.
Opening in Saint Domingue a few years before the Haitian revolution would tear it apart, the story has at its center Zarité, a mulatto whose extraordinary life takes her from that blood-soaked island to dangerous and freewheeling New Orleans from rural slave life to urban Creole life and a different kind of cruelty and adventure. , returns with another historical novel, one that soaks up so much past life that there is nowhere left to go but where countless have been. Allende, four years after Ines of My Soul
The best writers either warp it for selfish purposes (Gore Vidal), dig for the untold, interior history (Toni Morrison), or both (Jeannette Winterson). Of the many pitfalls lurking for the historical novel, the most dangerous is history itself.
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