Ishi, a young girl who lives in a small village in Peru, grows up wanting for nothing. Her life takes a turn for the worse when she falls in love with Don Amador, a notorious philanderer. He whisks her away to elope, and Ishi’s father, Don Teodosio, disowns Ishi. Teodosio and Ishi’s mother, Luisa, had intended Ishi to marry Pablo, the son of a respectable family. The new couple lives a difficult life, but Ishi is buoyed by women in the village who support her, even when Amador impregnates her cousin, Conchita.||Ishi eventually pulls herself up by her bootstraps, and earns a place in her community with her two children. It is Ishi’s metamorphosis that is the showcase of the book. The girl is as dumb as a box of rocks when she runs away to elope with Amador, but eventually grows into an industrious, entrepreneurial woman, who doesn’t need her husband to support her, and who takes steps to separate herself from him the best she can.||//Dona Isidora// is a showcase of Peruvian family values. Readers will see the importance of the nuclear family, with Ishi’s parents wanting to arrange her marriage, despite her having gone through her quinceanera, a rite of passage into adulthood for Peruvian youths. The families in Ishi’s village were staunchly Catholic, and embodied those values in their daily lives, and readers will catch a glimpse of the comforts religion offers those families, as well as the limitations it imposes. Ishi was able to get through the worst parts of her life by leaning on her faith, and eventually, she was able to forgive her cousin and find success. However, she was not able to divorce her husband, despite the harm and hardship he caused her.||While the themes and story were good, the formatting and editing in the book was completely abysmal. Sentences ran together, blatant spelling errors riddled the pages, quotation marks were facing the wrong way, and other punctuation was misplaced or missing. Duplicated words, missing letters, awkward spaces and paragraph breaks marred what would have otherwise been a wonderful story. This book was in desperate, desperate need of a competent copy editor. The book is $3.99 as an eBook and $19.99 for paperback on Amazon. Why should readers pay that money for a book that clearly isn’t the best it can be? They shouldn’t.||//Dona Isidora// is an engaging coming-of-age story that offered a window into the lives and values of another culture. The book contained messages about faith, perseverance, and family that will be invaluable to readers who can look past the major flaws in formatting and sentence structure.
Doña Isidora
