La isla bajo el mar

By Isabel Allende

Subjects: Spanish colonies, Colonies, Condiciones sociales, Haiti, fiction, Novela, Plantation life, Magical Realism, Esclavas, Easy reading materials, Befreiung, Vida en las plantaciones, Women slaves, Esclavage, Caña de azúcar, Fiction, historical, New York Times bestseller, Sugar plantations, Fiction, historical, general, Roman historique, Histoire, Mujeres mestizas, Romans, nouvelles, 18.33 Spanish-American literature, FICTION, Historical fiction, Slaves, fiction, Literary, Colonias, Caribbean area, fiction, Haitians, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, Spanish language materials, Plantaciones de azúcar, Historical, España, Sklaverei, Esclavos, nyt:hardcover-fiction=2010-05-16, Social conditions, New orleans (la.), fiction, Juvenile fiction, Cultivo, Slaves, History, Ficción, Racially mixed women, Play, Friendship, Plantation owners

Description: Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité -- known as Tété -- is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint-Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride -- but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave. Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of the intertwined lives of Tété and Valmorain, and of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruellest of circumstances. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.