Apalachee

In this "deeply involving" novel set in colonial Florida, a Native American woman is torn away from her husband and sold into slavery (Booklist). Spanish missionaries have settled in the Apalachee homeland on the Florida panhandle, introducing new diseases to the native population and attempting to convert them to Christianity. Despite these changes, the Apalachees maintain an uneasy coexistence with the friars. Everything changes when English soldiers and their Indian allies from the colony of Carolina invade Spanish Florida. After being driven from her Apalachee homeland by the English, Native American wise woman Hinachuba Lucia is captured by Creek Indians and sold into slavery in Carolina, where she becomes a house slave at Fairmeadow, a turpentine plantation near Charles Town. Her beloved husband, Carlos, is left behindfree but helpless to get Lucia back. Swept by inexorable currents, Lucia's fate is interwoven with those of Juan...