Paperback Edition
Published by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
Distributed by IngramSpark
Pub Date February 2019
On Sale Date March 14, 2019
ISBN 978-1-7326424-0-9
List Price: $18.00
Ebook Pub Date April 8, 2019
Ebook On Sale Date April 8, 2019
Ebook ISBN 978-1-7326424-1-6
Book Cover/Interior Designed by Cristina Castro Pelka
Cover Artwork by Dudley Vaccianna
Daughters of the Stone
A self-published paperback edition distributed by IngramSpark, Daughters of the Stone won the National Indie Excellence® Multicultural Fiction Award in 2020.
Click below to purchase your paperback edition.
Daughters of the Stone
Paperback Edition (2019)
ISBN 978-1-7326424-0-9
A lyrical powerful novel about a family of Afro-Puerto Rican women spanning five generations, detailing their physical and spiritual journey from the Old World to the New.
It is the mid-1800s. Fela, taken from Africa, is working at her second sugar plantation in colonial Puerto Rico, where her mistress is only too happy to benefit from her impressive embroidery skills. But Fela has a secret. Before she and her husband were separated and sold into slavery, they performed a tribal ceremony in which they poured the essence of their unborn child into a very special stone. Fela keeps the stone with her, waiting for the chance to finish what she started. When the plantation owner approaches her, Fela sees a better opportunity for her child, and allows the man to act out his desire. Such is the beginning of a line of daughters connected by their intense love for one another, and the stories of a lost land.
Mati, a powerful healer and noted craftswoman, is grounded in a life that is disappearing in a quickly changing world.
Concha, unsure of her place, doesn’t realize the price she will pay for rejecting her past.
Elena, modern and educated, tries to navigate between two cultures, moving to New York, where she struggles to keep her family together.
Carisa turns to the past for wisdom and strength when her life in New York falls apart.
The stone becomes meaningful to each of the women, pulling them through times of crisis.
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa shows great skill and warmth in the telling of this heartbreaking, inspirational story about mothers and daughters, and the ways in which they hurt and save one another.
PRAISE
for
Daughters of the Stone
“
This first novel traces the lives of succeeding generations of Puerto Rican women from the
19th century onward.
Though its ambitious
historical narrative is reminiscent of the Latin American boom writers, it has a distinct personality of its own. In particular, I enjoyed its feminist perspective as well as the author's tender loving care about language, a quality I find badly wanting in many a book published today.
“
Rejoice!
Here is a novel
you have never read
before: the story
of a long line of extraordinary
Afro-Puerto Rican
women silenced
by history. In
Daughters of the Stone, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa rescues them from oblivion and richly, compellingly,
magically introduces
them to literature— and
to the world.
¡Bienvenidas!
“
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa's Daughters of the Stone sings as few novels can. It also tells us of a culture and nation that is under-represented in our literature: Puerto Rico. And it does so with brilliant flourishes, in a narrative both gripping and intimate. Conveying a wide sweep of history, as witnessed by several generations of women, the book has the warmth of an autobiography while sustaining a firm and stately control of
technique and language.