Synopses & Reviews
Ximena, chronically ill, spends hours in bed looking at picture books, thinking, and dreaming. Her imagination stimulated by fairy tales, Greek myths, and ancient Indian legends, she confuses fantasy with everyday existence. Forced to piece together snippets of information gleaned from her parents' conversations and her own observations, she forms a not-quite-coherent picture of life in the Andes, where her window looks out on both a magnificent landscape and the squalor of an Indian encampment. But her world begins to change. The Indians rebel, and her parents make preparations to flee their home. Ximena begins to awaken from her muddle of fantasies and realities to her own complexities and to society's prejudices.
Synopsis
Ximena, chronically ill, spends hours in bed looking at picture books, thinking, dreaming. Her imagination stimulated by stories, she confuses fantasy with everyday existence. Forced to piece together snippets of information gleaned from her parents'conversations and her own observations, she forms a not-quite-coherent picture of life in the Andes. But her world begins to change and Ximena begins to awaken from the muddle of her fantasies and realities to her complexities and to society's prejudices.
Synopsis
Fiction. Translated from the Spanish by Mary G. Berg. Selected as 1994's Best Novel of the Year in Peru, Riesco's North American debut is an intimate, beautifully wrought story of a young girl whose growing consciousness of social injustice during the 1940s coincides with the discovery of her own storytelling powers. The frail only child of wealthy parents, Ximena continually seeks to get beyond the parameters of her narrow existence by reading books ... Riesco's prose is luminous, and her rendering of a child's sensibility is remarkably authentic ... the narrative is rich with the vivid, varied landscape and lore of a country in flux, but its greatest triumph is Ximena herself -- Publishers Weekly.