This book was a gift from someone special, so it was a pity I did not liked the book as much as I wanted. The Portuguese summary seemed quite interesting, promising to tell of "the golden age of coffee plantations and their ruin after the abolition of slavery" and "the story of a great love." While the first part was done with some success, the second not so.
Maybe I should start by saying I read it in Portuguese and despite the author's name sounding Portuguese, the book was originally published in German but the Portuguese translation is made from a Spanish edition. I don't know if it was because all this, which makes the text come to us by a third hand, but there was something in the writing that I did not enjoyed. Sometimes the language seemed a bit childish, there were times when the language seemed somewhat forced, and I never could quite understand if they tried to "sweeten" the Portuguese to sound a bit more like Brazilian. As I said, there was something in writing which I didn't enjoyed, which meant that reading was not as smooth as I expected.
The story itself also wasn't that appealing, as though it is a book of considerable size (though I've read bigger volumes, like those be Diana Gabaldon), the relationships between the characters are not exploited, being the most notable case, that of the protagonists. The relationship seems to be born from nothing: at one time they don't know each other and then they love each other madly. One never gets to see what seduced them, if the intelligence, the spirit or the sensuality of both. I lean more towards the latter because there doesn't seem to be so many disagreements, as it was said in the summary of the edition I read, but a misunderstanding and a tremendous bipolarity of the two characters who can't seem to decide if they like each other or not, unless when they go to bed... The romance is boring and the least interesting part of the book, while the historical context is more appealing, even if addressed superficially. Even so I enjoyed reading about the large plantations, about the abolition of slavery, what came of that and may have persisted in time, since it seems to come from this time the problem of the "favelas".
It had a good premise that unfortunately is not fully realized. Yet it might be interesting to know more about this time in the history of Brazil which, again, I didn't knew very well because it wasn't much explored in history lessons.