Teresa of the New World

By Sharman Apt Russell

~My Review~

4 stars

Teresa of the New World is not your typical story, it's a story about the world and how things change, extinctions happen, people are cruel to each other, but ultimately it's about one girl who lived a terribly hard live and survived. Not only survived but survived with compassion for others. This was not your typical read and at times I struggled a little with the story. But I love unique stories, and this was truly a unique story, as I can not remember a time when I have read anything similar to this one.

The story begins with Teresa as a young girl and tells the terrible things she sees and experiences during her young life, and ultimately how she survives abandonment, enslavement and plagues on her own. There is much more to the story, but that is the basics. There are bits about shapeshifters, and I do wish the author had expounded on that part of the story, but perhaps that is so come in the next book!

About the Book:

In 1528, the real-life conquistador Cabeza de Vaca shipwrecked in the New World where he lived as a slave, trader, and shaman. In this lyrical weaving of history and myth, the adventurer takes his young daughter Teresa from her home in Texas to travel to outposts in New Spain. Once there, Teresa is left behind as a servant in a Spanish household. But when an epidemic of measles devastates the area, the teenager must set off on a new journey, listening again to the voices of the desert, befriending a war-horse and were-jaguar, sinking into the earth to swim through fossil and stone, reclaiming her power to outwit the cunning figure of Plague. A story of apocalypse and hope, Teresa of the New World takes you into the dreamscape of the sixteenth-century American Southwest.

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About the Author:

Sharman Apt Russell has lived in the beauty and magic of Southwestern deserts almost all her life and continues to be amazed by that. She has published over a dozen books translated into a dozen languages, including fiction and nonfiction. Teresa of the New World is her third middle-grade and young adult novel.
Sharman teaches graduate writing classes at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico and Antioch University in Los Angeles, California and has thrice served as the PEN West judge for their annual children’s literature award. Her awards include a Rockefeller Fellowship, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Henry Joseph Jackson Award. Her work has been widely anthologized, with numerous starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist. The San Francisco Chronicle has said “Russell’s writing is luminous” and Kirkus Reviews wrote, “A deep reverence for nature shines throughout Russell’s rich, enjoyable text.” The Seattle Times described her An Obsession with Butterflies as a “masterpiece of story-telling” and the San Diego Union Tribune called it “A singular work of art, with its smooth, ethereal prose and series after cascading series of astonishing lore.” The New York Times and Discover Magazine both described her book on hunger as “elegant.” Of her Anatomy of a Rose, the Sunday Times (London) said, “Every page holds a revelation.”

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Giveaway:

Four (4) signed copies of Teresa of the New World

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