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Teresa of the New World

From the bestselling author of An Obsession with Butterflies comes a magical story of America in the time of the conquistadors.

In 1528, the real-life conquistador Cabeza de Vaca shipwrecked in the New World, where he lived for eight years as a slave, trader, and shaman. In this lyrical weaving of history and myth, the adventurer takes his four-year-old daughter Teresa from her home in coastal Texas to travel with him as a companion. But once Cabeza de Vaca reaches the outposts of New Spain and prepares to return overseas, politics compel him to leave the young girl behind. Her new life is that of a servant in the kitchen of a Spanish official.

Teresa grows up estranged from the magic she knew as a child, when she could speak to the earth and listen to animals. When a new epidemic of measles devastates the area, sixteen-year-old Teresa sets off in pursuit of a wisewoman she once met, a woman with secrets — a possible mentor. The girl befriends a warhorse, abandoned by a Spanish soldier grieving the death of his family, and a Mayan boy, a werejaguar who cannot control his shape-shifting. Because the boy and Teresa carry the measles virus, they are chased by Plague, another shape-shifter who takes on many human forms: Teresa’s dead mother, the housekeeper from the Spanish kitchen, and finally Cabeza de Vaca himself. Plague tries to trick Teresa into entering northern villages to further spread the epidemic.

To save herself and others, she is forced to listen to the earth again, sinking underground, swimming through limestone and fossil beds, looking for the means to outwit Plague, tame the jaguar in the Mayan boy, and find her own place in the New World.

Winner of Arizona Author's Award for Fiction, finalist for New Mexico Book Award for Children's Literature and the May Sarton Award for Children's Literature.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 192
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781631580420
  • Genres
  • adventure, fiction
  • Release date
  • 2015