The Seamstress: A Novel

by Frances de Pontes Peebles

Overview

Winner of the Friends of American Writers Award for Fiction

As seamstresses, the young sisters Emília and Luzia dos Santos know how to cut, mend, and conceal—useful skills in the lawless backcountry of Brazil, where ruthless land barons feud with bands of outlaw cangaceiros, trapping innocent residents in the crossfire. Emília, a naive romantic, dreams of falling in love with a gentleman and escaping to a big city. Quick-tempered Luzia also longs for escape, finding it in her craft and secret prayers to the saints she believes once saved her life. But when Luzia is abducted by cangaceiros led by the infamous Hawk and Emília stumbles into a marriage with the son of a wealthy and politically powerful doctor, the sisters' quiet lives diverge in ways they never would have imagined.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060738884
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/28/2009
Pages:	656
Sales rank:	1,098,906
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.04(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

Frances de Pontes Peebles's short stories have appeared in Indiana Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and the collection O. Henry Prize Stories, 2005. Born in Pernambuco, Brazil, she is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She divides her time between Brazil and Miami.

What People are Saying About This

Aryn Kyle

“THE SEAMSTRESS is a gripping portrait of the lives of two sisters caught in the political unbalance of a country at a crossroads. Bittersweet, beautifully written, this sweeping saga is as impossible to put down as it is to forget.”

Editorial Reviews

This impressive debut novel seduces with its sweeping story, strong characterization, and extraordinarily vivid detail. A good read-alike for fans of Isabel Allende.” — Booklist (starred review)

“[An] engrossing historical saga. . . . The novel’s true beauty is the exquisitely realized relationship between Emilia and Luzia, two strong women who, despite the separate paths their lives take, remain connected and committed to each other.” — Library Journal

“THE SEAMSTRESS is a gripping portrait of the lives of two sisters caught in the political unbalance of a country at a crossroads. Bittersweet, beautifully written, this sweeping saga is as impossible to put down as it is to forget.” — Aryn Kyle, author of THE GOD OF ANIMALS

From the Publisher

THE SEAMSTRESS is a gripping portrait of the lives of two sisters caught in the political unbalance of a country at a crossroads. Bittersweet, beautifully written, this sweeping saga is as impossible to put down as it is to forget.

Aryn Kyle

This impressive debut novel seduces with its sweeping story, strong characterization, and extraordinarily vivid detail. A good read-alike for fans of Isabel Allende.

Booklist (starred review)

"This impressive debut novel seduces with its sweeping story, strong characterization, and extraordinarily vivid detail. A good read-alike for fans of Isabel Allende."

Booklist

This lavishly detailed if overlong debut novel set in 1920s and '30s Brazil follows two sisters who share excellent sewing skills, but take divergent paths into adulthood. Crippled by a childhood accident and mocked for her deformities, Luzia is considered unmarriageable. So after a bandit kidnaps her, she realizes that marrying the outlaw leader may be her only chance at independence and happiness. Beautiful Emília, yearning for the refinements of the big city, spurns her many rural suitors, but-reeling from her sister's abduction and her aunt's subsequent death-enters a disastrous marriage with a wealthy, suave stranger who has plenty of untoward secrets and a mother who treats Emília like dirt. The sisters' paths collide after Luzia, now mythologized as a vicious criminal known as the Seamstress, becomes targeted by Emília's criminologist father-in-law, unaware of the two women's connection. Though a good number of passages could have been left on the cutting-room floor, the leisurely pace and attention to detail immerse the reader in both gilded halls and unsavory bandit camps. (Aug.)

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Publishers Weekly

This engrossing historical saga of Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s follows sisters Emília and Luzia dos Santos from their impoverished childhoods as village seamstresses to their unimaginable futures: Emília marries the scion of an upper-class family in Recife, while Luzia marries The Hawk, an infamous bandit-cum-Robin Hood who terrorizes provincial landowners. Using as backdrop the populist revolt of 1930 and the push to develop Brazil's enormous resources at the expense of the subsistence farmers, Peebles creates a vast and diverse cast of characters: Dr. Coehlo, Emília's father-in-law, who believes that the measure of a man's skull is a predictor of his behavior; The Hawk's men, all of them killers driven to crime by unjust landowners; Lindalba, a baroness's daughter who recognizes Emília's talent as a dress designer and helps her exploit it; and a mélange of scheming politicians, villagers, and society women. However, the novel's true beauty is the exquisitely realized relationship between Emília and Luzia, two strong women who, despite the separate paths their lives take, remain connected and committed to each other. Recommended for most public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ4/15/07, p. 64.]
—Andrea Kempf

Library Journal

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. This debut novel from Peebles, a native of Brazil, concerns Em'lia and Luzia dos Santos, virtuous sisters living in poverty on one of the vast, near-feudal estates of the swampy interior. Em'lia 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. 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. Luzia, for her part, becomes a sure hand with most forms of contemporary weaponry, slaying one running dog of reaction after another ("The first cut's always the hardest. After that, it gets easier") while keeping her pinking shears within reach. And Em'lia-well, she's gone off and married the son of a big landowner, since to do otherwise would have thrown the whole twin-track story off balance. Neither sister feels complete without the other, and neither has the true love she deserves-or does she? Em'lia's a peach, but unappreciated; for all her deformities, Luzia has a certain Sonia Braga quality to her, but the Hawk isjust plain paranoid, the hubby a drip and the jungle just too murky, which means only one thing: Darling, we love you, but give us Park Avenue or a pine box. Peebles's novel is one of two about seamstresses being published in August (see the review of The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw, also in this issue). Slow-moving, long and meandering, like an Amazonian stream-with moments of beauty, but in need of a machete. Agent: Dorian Karchmar/Lowenstein-Yost

Kirkus Reviews