A review by theboricuabookworm
A Woman of Endurance by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

4.75

This was a gut wrenching story about one woman's experience as a slave during the mid-1800s in Puerto Rico, an often forgetting part of the history of slavery.  Resilience and magic because of the women she has around her shine through some of the worst atrocities man have ever committed.  Our ancestors provide strength and guidance like no other and Pola survived because of that. It is an incredibly tough book to read as Llanos-Figueroa did not write over what Pola and some of the other women went through with flowery, metaphorical language. There is not necessarily a happy ending but rather a hopeful one that made the realities of the story all the more stark. 

A raw and necessary story of an often forgotten part of history. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Body shaming, Death, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Slavery, Violence, Kidnapping, Grief, Murder, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail

I put all tags under graphic not because all of them were incredibly detailed on the page but so readers understand the depths of the story and approach it eyes open