Born of a Spaniard and a mixed-race woman, Concepción Benavidez was apprenticed as a scribe to a convent. At nineteen, she escapes and is captured in the siege of Vera Cruz in 1683. She unexpectedly becomes the property of a Dutch pirate, who rapes her repeatedly on the long, deadly journey to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Realizing the young mestiza has fine penmanship, he promptly sells her upon arrival. Concepción is thrust into a world where she doesn't understand the language or customs. Bought by Merchant Greenwood to tend to his old father-in-law, she is regarded with suspicion and is considered a papist half-breed who speaks the language of the devil. Greenwood immediately forbids her to speak her native tongue and changes her name. The merchant's barren wife discovers that the girl is pregnant with the pirate's child. And she covets the baby, causing them to spar for the child's love and affection. But when several women in Salem Village are imprisoned for witchcraft, it's not long before people start whispering about Concepción. This riveting historical novel combines the horror of the Salem witch trials with the work of the nun and writer known as the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this novel takes a mesmerizing look at women in the New World in the 17th century and the stubborn men who accuse them for no reason.
"Widely disparate strands of New World history converge in this fiction from de Alba … [her] Puritans are as rich and complex as any characters in recent historical fiction."
