A DAUGHTER'S PLACE, voices for the voiceless at last...but what they talk about...!

A DAUGHTER'S PLACE
MARTHA BÁTIZ
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping historical romance inspired by the real-life daughter of Miguel de Cervantes, celebrated author of Don Quixote

Madrid, 1599. Following her mother’s sudden death, fifteen-year-old Isabel goes to live in the family home of her father, the poet and war hero Miguel de Cervantes, a man she has never met. Forced to pose as a maid to conceal her illegitimate status, Isabel must adapt to a new way of life with her jealous cousin and protective aunts while she waits for her father to return from Seville. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Esquivias, Miguel’s pious and faithful wife Catalina similarly awaits his return, blissfully unaware of Isabel’s existence.

As Miguel works on the manuscript that will become his masterpiece, Don Quixote, the years pass and Isabel grows into womanhood, falling in and out love, uncovering family secrets, and yearning for the legitimacy denied her by a rigid and callous society. Capturing two tumultuous decades of Golden Age Spain in rich historical detail, Martha Bátiz paints a compassionate portrait of a family on the precipice of great change and the fiercely independent woman at its centre striving to make a life of her own.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Isabella, Cervantes' bastard daughter, was (intentionally) the shining star of the read. She was resilient enough to accept her circumstances as they were. It's not easy...take it from someone who could not, cratered, and then built back. Her way forward was always to find the bottom then push against her obstacles. I admired that.

Catalina, Cervantes' wife, was a really nasty, pious, pinched bag of judgment, blame, and nastiness. I was quite pleased her god judged her and found her "heart's desire" (read: social ambition/status symbol) to be deniable. Luckily we spend more time seeing the trail of viciousness and destruction she leaves than in her company or I'd be psychotic with rage. Constanza, his niece, is...well...let's say that in a novel that fails the Bechdel test on every level from idea, through execution, to effect on the reader, she is the most egregious offender. No woman in this book is not thinking about a man, usually Cervantes, for more than a couple pages at a stretch.

That's period-appropriate, though in a story told by a professional translator in modern vernacular, it feels a bit...disingenuous...not to toss us a few scenes of either not-period self-awareness or incongruous anger at the oppressive system. Hey ho. Such are the things that lose good work stars in my readerly firmament. It's mildly irritating to me, but a committed feminist without a solid grasp of the early modern world's prejudices might not be as mild-mannered about it.

A big mitigating factor for me was the fact that this story centers women who are, as is so often the case, utterly ignored by History. Centering them would've been better, but the fact that there is no PoV dedicated to Cervantes makes the words they speak (even though they're about him) their own...more than History ever gave them. The bigger mitigating factor is Author Bátiz doing such a stellar job making me feel the passage of literal decades in the past. That takes skill, to convincingly make the time between events feel so intensely present despite the story taking place in the past. If Author Bátiz ever writes a mystery, I want to be first on the DRC list. Her suspense muscles are powerful!

Isabella's journey is a darn good read, deserves the praise it's received, and does the best work available to it by offering voices to women History silenced.

Did they have to talk about men so much?