Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s A Girl of Endurance: A Novel was printed in April 2022 (HarperCollins). [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]
Description: Combining the haunting energy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved with the evocative ambiance of Phillippa Gregory’s A Respectable Commerce, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s groundbreaking novel illuminates a bit mentioned side of historical past—the Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Commerce—witnessed by the experiences of Pola, an African captive used as a breeder to bear extra slaves.
A Girl of Endurance, set in nineteenth-century Puerto Rican plantation society, follows Pola, a deeply religious African lady who’s captured and later offered for the aim of breeding future slaves. The ensuing infants are taken from her as quickly as they’re born. Pola loses the religion that has guided her and turns into embittered and defensive. The dehumanizing violence of her life virtually destroys her. However this isn’t a novel of defeat however fairly one in all survival, regeneration, and reclamation of frequent humanity.
Readers are invited to affix Pola in her journey to therapeutic. From the sadistic barbarity of her first experiences, she strikes on to obtain compassion and assist from a revitalizing new neighborhood. Alongside the best way, she learns to acknowledge and embrace the numerous faces of affection—a mom’s love, a daughter’s love, a sister’s love, a love of neighborhood, and the self-love that she should recuperate earlier than she will be able to provide herself to a different. It’s in the end, a novel of the triumph of the human spirit even underneath essentially the most brutal of situations.
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico. As a baby she was despatched to reside along with her grandparents within the South Bronx, the place she was launched to the tradition of rural Puerto Rico, together with the storytelling abilities that got here naturally to the ladies, particularly the older ladies, in her household. A lot of her work relies on her experiences throughout this time. Llanos-Figueroa taught artistic writing, language and literature within the New York Metropolis faculty system earlier than turning into a young-adult librarian and author. Her first novel, Daughters of the Stone, was a Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and her brief tales have been printed in anthologies and literary magazines such as Breaking Floor: Anthology of Puerto Rican Ladies Writers in New York 1980-2012, Rising Up Lady, Afro-Hispanic Evaluation, Pleaides, Latino E-book Evaluation, Label Me Latina/o and Kweli Journal. She lives in New York Metropolis.
For extra data, see https://www.harpercollins.com/merchandise/a-woman-of-endurance-dahlma-llanos-figueroa