ONLY SOFIA-ELISABETE

Romance, adventure, and danger attend the travels of a British Portuguese teenage girl in this literary historical novel.

Sofia-Elisabete Fitzwilliam made her first appearance in I, Sofia-Elisabete, Love Child of Colonel Fitzwilliam (2018), recounting her experiences as a 5-year-old in 1815. The girl’s mother, Doña Marisa, who’d abandoned her in a convent years ago, stole her away from England and her father, Col. Fitzwilliam (the poor cousin of Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). After some time, her father tracked her down, and Sofia-Elisabete’s parents agreed to take turns raising her. But when she was 11 and ready to return to England, her father never showed up. In this sequel, it’s 1825, and Sofia-Elisabete, almost 15, feels stifled by her authoritarian stepfather, Don Rafael, and the expectations that young Spanish women be pious, pure, and think only of marriage and babies. Further, Sofia-Elisabete longs to experience the passion of love—in a country where women don’t allow men even to touch their hands. When her flirtation with handsome bolero dancer Antonio de Silva goes too far, she is sent posthaste to her beloved grandfather in Cádiz. There, Antonio is soon eclipsed by Kitt Munro, a 20-year-old Scottish student traveling as a research assistant. Sofia-Elisabete is bewitched by his intelligence, good manners, and freckles, and he’s equally enamored. But their burgeoning romance is interrupted when Kitt is called home to Scotland, leaving Sofia-Elisabete to deal with her cash-strapped family’s insistence that she marry a rich, thoroughly loathsome older man. She manages to escape and makes a long and dangerous journey toward Britain, experiencing such misadventures on the way that she loses her wits. Kitt finds and rescues her, but that isn’t the last of their struggles. Grueling travel, reported deaths, amnesia, injury, and separation stand between Sofia-Elisabete and the fulfillment of her dreams.

In this volume, Kobayashi develops her charming child hero into a thoughtful, passionate, and equally delightful teenager. While she’s a typical adolescent in her impatience to burst through restrictive bonds and experience life, Sofia-Elisabete exhibits insightful maturity, as when she reflects on the accusation that she’s lazy, pampered, and spoiled and admits she has been selfish and desperate to get her own way. She also has a wonderfully lyrical imagination, as when she plays the harp for Kitt and fantasizes about drifting down a river to a marsh, where he becomes a swallow: “A balmy breeze swept us to sea, and so, I raised high my mantilla to make a sail, guiding us into the bay of Cádiz, past the tangle of ship masts, past the naked sea-bathers, past the urchins angling for St. Peter’s fishes. Mr. Munro fluttered his wings and he settled upon my shoulder, to sing tenderly in my ear.” The complicated plot’s melodrama is balanced with humor, poignancy, and moments of magical realism, particularly when Kitt disappears and Sofia-Elisabete searches for him in the haunted islands of the Inner Hebrides.

A rich, original, and engrossing drama featuring a remarkably engaging hero.