I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. Set in the 18th century Spain, it starts off with an unlikely event of a seducer being killed by the apparition of the young woman's father, dead in the duel required to avenge the ill-treatment of his daughter. And then things just spiral out of control with travelling to share the news, only to throw the ancestral village into disarray. What the book does highlight is the chasm between the lives of the landowners and those who work on it, and how things can't just stay the same. ( )