Spoiled with beauty, riches, and adoration, a young girl from Avila is sent to a convent by her father to avoid the scandal caused by her budding relationship with a local bachelor, but discovers instead an unparalleled spiritual fervor - one so powerful as to be condemned as sinful by some. She is Teresa de Ahumada, the woman who will become Saint Teresa - known as a visionary, reformer, and founder of convents, she was the author of numerous texts that introduced her revolutionary religious ideas and practices to a society suffering through the madness of the Spanish Inquisition. In Barbara Mujica's tale, her story - her days of youthful romance, sensual fits of spiritual rapture, family's secret heritage as Jewish converts to Catholicism, cloak-and-dagger political dealings, struggles against sexual blackmail, and mysterious illness - unfolds with a tumultuous urgency. Blending fact with fiction, Mujica's tale conjures a picture of sisterhood, faith, the terror of religious persecution, the miracle of salvation, and one woman's challenge to the power of strict orthodoxy, a challenge that consisted of a crime of passion - her own personal relationship with God. Read Less