Prospero's Daughter.

* Prospero's Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez Ballantine Books, March 2006 $24.95, ISBN 0-345-45535-5

Interracial love. Violence. Black-power politics. White magic. Unspeakable secrets. This combustible mix plays out in Elizabeth Nunez's dreamy, modern retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, set in the author's native Trinidad. It is the early 1960s and a fledging independence movement is stirring, causing the nervous British colonialists who have made the island home to worry about the long-term prospects of their privileged status. Against this setting is a love story between a young British girl, Virginia, and a biracial Trinidadian boy, Carlos, who grew up under the same roof and under the warped parenting of Peter Gardner, a morally challenged and racist British doctor who is Virginia's biological father. He was also a father figure and brutish master to the young orphaned Carlos.

Gardner shows up one day at the front door of the big, beautiful house built by Carlos's father on the remote island of Chacachacare, off the main island, where the boy now lives with his late mother's housekeeper and the housekeeper's daughter. It is the morning after a terrible storm, and the doctor has come to offer to repair the storm-damaged house in exchange for room and board. Soon he takes over the house against the protests of Carlos and with the passive acquiescence of the boy's dying caregiver. It quickly becomes clear that the good doctor is anything but.

When he discovers that Carlos, by now a teenager, has fallen for Virginia, an enraged Gardner falsely accuses Carlos of a sexual crime and has him arrested. The rest of story plays out as a tale of betrayal, redemption and the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of white oppression.

"The European colonialist had set the rules" Nunez writes. "They had discovered that they could use gradations in skin color to replicate a class system that would give them ranking impossible for them to attain in their own countries. Here, they realized, color not bloodlines could make one a lord. White skin alone was all the credentials they needed for entry into the upper class. The rest followed. Light-skinned natives with straight hair got admitted to the upper middle class; brown-skinned natives with curly hair to the middle class; but black-skinned natives with kinky hair found themselves firmly relegated to the lower class."

Like her award-winning novel Bruised Hibiscus, which is also based in Trinidad, Prospero's Daughter is a rich story that moves back and forth easily between the past and the present, between reality and fantasy, and between falsely perceived truth and the truth that ultimately sets the characters free. It is a story about the transformative power of love, and readers are sure to enjoy the journey. [See THE WRITING LIFE by Elizabeth Nunez, on page 24.]

Marjorie Valbrun is an editorial writer at The Baltimore Sun.