A new read (in celebration of the eclipse? . . . or do I need an excuse?). I could not resist. Europa Editions (whose front and backlists are like a reader's smorgasbord of delights) kindly sent me a review copy of Chantal Acevedo's forthcoming The Living Infinite, which has been on my reading wishlist. Now it is here and I have cracked open and started reading. I am in the mood for some good historical fiction and this sounds like a winner:
" . . . based on the true story of the Spanish princess Eulalia, an outspoken firebrand at the Bourbon court during the troubled and decadent final years of her family's reign. After her cloistered childhood at the Spanish court, her youth spent in exile, and a loveless marriage, Eulalia gladly departs Europe for the New World. In the company of Thomas Aragon, the son of her one-time wet nurse and a small-town bookseller with a thirst for adventure, she travels by ship first to a Cuba bubbling with revolutionary fervor then on to the 1893 Chicago World Fair. As far as others are concerned, she is there as an emissary of the Bourbon dynasty and a guest of the Fair. Secretly, she is in America to find a publisher for her scandalous, incendiary autobiography, a book that might well turn the old world order on its head."
I have been eyeing her books for a while. For some reason I thought she wrote in Spanish and would be a perfect WITMonth author (I have not done very well at reading WIT this month as it turns out), but she was born in Miami, but it's all good. She has written several other books, all seem to have received very favorable reviews, so I think the moment has come for me to read her, too.
I've only just started reading and Eulalia has just 'arrived'. Isabel is her mother and has gone through twelve births with only five living children, but Eulalia is already showing promise after an iffy beginning.
"Isabel let out a bark of laughter when the little infanta sneezed, but the sounds converged with shouts of anger and cries of anguish coming from the streets of Madrid--anger because the flag and the salvos had announced a girl, and anguish there would be no spare son, so ardently for in those dark, frightening days. She was named Eulalia, which meant 'well spoken.' No other Spanish royal had shared the appellation, and so it was a name for the present and the future, a name without a past."
I fully expect great things from Eulalia and I imagine her life will not always be an easy one. But I am rooting for her and am ready to follow her life and adventures.