Ratings8
Average rating3.9
Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité -- known as Tété -- is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves.
When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint-Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride -- but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.
Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of the intertwined lives of Tété and Valmorain, and of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruellest of circumstances.
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Reviews with the most likes.
I agree with some other reviews on here. While I appreciate Isabel allende's writing style and her opinions, this book was very long and started out incredibly slow.
However, by the time I got to the end I appreciated all the backstory so it was worth it and it certainly picked up in the second half of the novel but I must admit it took me a ridiculously long time to get through the first half (almost a month I believe) and only a few days to get through the second because I couldn't stop myself from reading.
The characters were all really interesting, especially since we got to see them through many many many years of their lives.