![]() Well, nothing will set a future revolutionary off like getting dissed by the local yokels, and so it goes: Luzia hooks up with the local peasant bandits- cum-revolutionaries, led by one Hawk, who “had become a cangaceiro when he killed the famous Colonel Bartolomeu of Serra Negra in his own study, bypassing the colonel’s capangas and gutting him with his own letter opener.” Bad way to go, that. Emília is sentimental and gushy, given to praying to Saint Anthony to one day send her a prince-and soon, for as the book opens she is “nineteen and already an old maid.” Sister Luzia, meanwhile, has taken a nasty spill from a tall tree and been awarded cruel nicknames by the other kids for her troubles. ![]() This debut novel from Peebles, a native of Brazil, concerns Emília and Luzia dos Santos, virtuous sisters living in poverty on one of the vast, near-feudal estates of the swampy interior. Two sisters work both banks of the river and both sides of the law, united in their knowledge of stitchery, in this ponderous semi-epic, set in the steamy Brazilian jungle in the 1920s and ’30s. ![]()
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