Book summary

An Englishwoman recalls her troubled marriage to a Venezuelan, and the years she lived at the family hacienda. When Lisa St. Aubin married Jaime de Teran in 1968, she barely knew a thing about him apart from his name and the fact that he was rich, aristocratic, and extremely handsome. After their wedding--when she was 18--she soon saw signs of instability in her husband, accompanied by a neglect that bordered on hostility, though they did manage to conceive one child, a daughter. As St. Aubin describes how she coped with motherhood, illness, death, homesickness, the running of a prosperous sugar plantation, and the difficulties--never fully overcome--of fitting in as a foreigner in an ancient and obsessively traditional society, she provides a stirring and sympathetic portrait of a determined young woman who succeeds in keeping herself intact in the face of what might seem insurmountable odds. She also manages to convey the appealing lushness of a place and a culture that seduced her even as it tested her to the limit.

Media reviews

"A funny, frightening memoir."