Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018
In 1815, a 5-year-old girl searches for Utopia in a post-Napoleonic Europe. The girl, an abandoned love child, finds and then loses her beloved father. Will they ever find each other again? A touching tale of heartache told through a child’s eyes with truth, love and a bit of magic.
Sofia-Elisabete, the illegitimate child of Colonel Fitzwilliam, is a five-year-old firecracker with a true heart, an irrepressible spirit and a passion to be the best drummer girl. An inquisitive child, she senses the dark secrets surrounding her mysterious beginnings as a foundling in Portugal and the strange goings on in the tangled-up world of her troubled father, who adores her while harboring a great affection for someone called Mr. O.P. Umm.
Who is the enchanting Doña Marisa, who lures Sofia-Elisabete away in a search of the perfect world in the moon? Heartsick at being separated from her father, Sofia-Elisabete embarks on an odyssey in a post-Napoleonic continent in the company of Doña Marisa and her ragtag retinue, determined to find the utopia on the moon—a magical place where no one is ever sick or sad—and which she fervently believes will cure her father’s bouts with melancholy. Will Sofia-Elisabete’s childish innocence survive this emotional journey to find the perfect moon world?
I, Sofia-Elisabete, in part, reimagines the life and destiny of Colonel Fitzwilliam, the curiously evasive and opaque character in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.