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    Prospero's Daughter
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    Prospero's Daughter
    Unavailable
    Prospero's Daughter
    Ebook454 pages7 hours

    Prospero's Daughter

    By Elizabeth Nunez

    2/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "The very title of Elizabeth Nunez's gripping and richly imagined sixth novel, Prospero's Daughter, distances her work from both the original Tempest (in which the daughter, Miranda, is perhaps the least developed of all Shakespearean heroines) and from the many postcolonial reactions to the play...Nunez, who is a master at pacing and plotting, explores the motivations behind Caliban's outburst, hatching an entirely new story that is inspired by Shakespeare, but not beholden to him."
    --New York Times Book Review

    "Masterful...simply wonderful...[an] exquisite retelling of The Tempest."
    --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

    "Absorbing...[Nunez] writes novels that resound with thunder and fury."
    --Essence

    "A story about the transformative power of love...Readers are sure to enjoy the journey."
    --Black Issues Book Review

    Prospero's Daughter is a captivating recreation of Shakespeare's The Tempest set on a verdant Caribbean island during the height of tensions between the native population and British colonists. Using Shakespeare's play as a template to address questions of race, class, and power, Nunez turns an intimate eye to an unlikely bond formed between a boy and a girl of disparate backgrounds.

    When Peter Gardner's ruthless medical genius leads him to experiment on his unwitting patients--often at the expense of their lives--he flees England, seeking an environ where his experiments might continue without scrutiny. He arrives with his three-year-old-daughter, Virginia, in Chacachacare, an isolated island off the coast of Trinidad, in the early 1960s.

    Gardner considers the locals to be nothing more than savages. He assumes ownership of the home of a servant boy named Carlos, seeing in him a suitable subject upon whom to continue his amoral medical work. Nonetheless, he educates the boy alongside Virginia. As Virginia and Carlos grow and come of age together, they form a covert relationship that violates the outdated mores of colonial rule.

    When Gardner unveils the pair's relationship and accuses Carlos of a monstrous act, the investigation into the truth is left up to a curt, stonehearted British inspector, whose inquiries bring to light a horrendous secret. At turns epic and intimate, Prospero's Daughter is one of the finest novels of the past two decades.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateOct 25, 2016
    ISBN9781617755422
    Unavailable
    Prospero's Daughter
    Author

    Elizabeth Nunez

    Elizabeth Nunez is the award-winning author of eight novels. Both Boundaries and Anna In-Between were New York Times Editors' Choices and Anna In-Between won the 2010 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and the 2011 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers and Barnes & Noble. Nunez also received a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award from the Trinidad & Tobago National Library. She is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, where she teaches fiction writing.

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    Reviews for Prospero's Daughter

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    • 2/5
      This title got my attention right away because of its link with Shakespeare. It's supposed to be a modern retelling of The Tempest, and I was interested in seeing what Nunez would do with that story. Unfortunately, I don't think it's a successful retelling.Prospero's Daughter is about an orphan named Carlos who lives in the Caribbean. Peter, who has escaped England with his small daughter to avoid a scandal, steals Carlos's home and forces Carlos and another native woman to work as his servants. When the time comes for Peter to give his daughter, Virginia, lessons, Carlos feels sorry for the girl, since she isn't able to learn them fast enough for her father and is yelled at constantly. Carlos, whose parents taught him to read, secretly teaches Virginia how to read at night so that she can impress her father. Eventually, they end up falling in love, and when Carlos tells Peter of his intentions to marry Virginia, Peter accuses Carlos of rape and launches an investigation, in the hopes of getting Carlos arrested.I think that the enjoyment you get out of this book really depends on what you're reading this book for. It's a great book about colonization, and what the natives go through when the English come in and take over their island. The story is well-written, and is generally enjoyable; however, if you're reading this as a modern retelling of The Tempest (as I was), or even for the "romance" you may be disappointed.I'm all in favor of authors changing original plot points and characters to fit in with their retelling of the story. I don't think that happened enough in Prospero's Daughter, and when it did, I wasn't sure why the story changed. For example, I found it strange that Peter is portrayed as a mad scientist and Carlos describes him putting on a robe decorated with stars to do magic. I didn't get this. At first, I thought it was Carlos's imagination, but later, I wasn't sure. Though he's supposed to be a stand-in for Prospero, this didn't make sense to the story in general, and I think that Peter would have been a perfect Prospero without the "magic robe." Especially since The Tempest is directly mentioned in the story and Carlos blatantly calls Peter Prospero. One thing that changed that I didn't like was the fact that Carlos teaches Virginia to read, whereas in the play, Miranda teaches Caliban. I'm not sure what purpose this change was supposed to serve, especially when other things are so strictly adhered to, even when it doesn't make sense within the world that Nunez has created.Though many people consider this a romance, I definitely do not. There is romance in this novel, but it's not really the main focus of the story. Actually, it's more of a plot device for the author to show the mistreatment and discrimination of the natives by the English. I also don't think that the resolution of what separates Virginia and Carlos is very well done. A romance between an English woman and a native from an island that the English have colonized will never be without its problems, and I think that Nunez overlooks the fact that there are some real challenges that people in the position of Virginia and Carlos would have faced.As for listening to the audiobook version, I have no complaints. I think that Vance did an amazing job with all the voices and the characters. The switching of points of view and the dialogue were all extraordinarily easy to follow. I only wish that the story could have been better so that I could have enjoyed Vance's narration all the more.