The Hacienda

by Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

From a prize-winning British author comes a lush, absorbing memoir--an "Out of Africa" set in the Venezuelan Andes. Tremendously atmospheric, "The Hacienda" brilliantly evokes the unique confluence of time, place, and people that shaped this powerful writer.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Biography Memoir, Travel, World Literature, Autobiography

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Lisa St. Aubin de Terán was born Lisa Rynveld in South London. She attended the James Allen's Girls' School. She married a Venezuelan landowner, Jaime Terán in 1971, at the age of 17, and became a farmer of sugar cane, avocados, pears, and sheep from 1972-1978.

Her second husband was the Scottish poet and novelist George MacBeth. After the marriage failed, she married painter Robbie Duff Scott and moved to Umbria, Italy.

In 1982, St. Aubin de Terán published her first novel, Keepers of the House. This novel was the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award. Her second novel, The Slow Train to Milan, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She received the Eric Gregory for Poetry in 1983. Her work includes novels, memoirs, poetry, and short-story collections.

St. Aubin de Terán has three children, including a daughter by her first husband, Iseult Teran, who is also a novelist.

She currently lives in Amsterdam with her partner Mees Van Deth, where she runs a film company and has set up the Terán Foundation in Mozambique.

Reviews

[Evie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Over and over again before I ever went there, I heard the name 'La Hacienda'. It was a place where sugar-cane grew in unimaginable abundance and avocado pears that dwarfed all others. It was a place without any clear dimensions: a frontierless tract of land steeped in history..."



With these words, Terán begins her poetic memoir of the seven years she spent on the generations old Venezuelan hacienda she inherited upon marrying her husband. To say that this book was eye-opening is an understatement. It's a page-turning adventure, reminiscent of Heart of Darkness.


A child bride when she arrives at Santa Rita, la gente, families and workers alike who have been sustained by their patrons for generations, have little respect or faith in Lisa's abilities to run the hacienda. Neglected for many years after her husband fled the country as a political criminal, and continues to shirk his responsibilities upon their return, the full power and responsibility to run the hacienda is thrown onto her shoulders. All at once, she must master the language, culture, flora and fauna, acquaint herself with the farming business, and become immune to Andean illnesses.



If you read the synopsis of this book, you'll quickly learn that Don Jaime, Lisa's husband, is kinda nuts. His rages and disappearances are strange. As she relates her experiences, incorporating many letters to her mother in London, it's what she often leaves out of these letters that is so compelling. Abundant in poetic descriptions of plant and wildlife, I imagined I'd traveled deep into the Andes myself. This woman can write! Depression, loneliness, elation, love, longing, fear, dread...it's all here, and fleshed out in such vivid language and word pictures.

"The cog wheels of the elements undid what the people with their ant-like toil had done. Storms, floods, earthquakes, fires and disease ruled over the hills and valleys with an incomprehensible tyranny. The uncertainty of life swung like random blades cutting the people down without any warning. Life had to be lived for the day, the future was always too unsure...Merely staying alive was an achievement, surviving for another day was cheating destiny."

"The longer I stayed on the hacienda, the more I became swallowed up by it. It was like the medicinal plants I had taken to studying, it could both kill and cure. It was like the boa constrictors the workmen found sometimes in the sugar-cane fields. It wrapped itself around a passing stranger, it squeezed and crushed until it had broken every single bone, then it slimed over its prey and engorged it, bit by bit, until no trace was left except for a transitory bulge. Eventually, that too would go and nothing would be left but the beautiful, powerful snake, waiting lazily for its next meal to wander by."

And perhaps my favorite passage from this book:

"Hope is a weed. It grows out of nowhere, it flourishes on the most barren places...There, on Santa Rita, I clung to hope, I spoon fed it, coaxed and cajoled it as I did my pets and sheep and trees. I built my house on grains of rock, magnifying them. I found a way to see light in the dark tunnels of that desolation."

I am ready to read everything else this woman has written. Bubba and I both agreed this book is worthy of a full paw rating, with a dew claw thrown in for good measure. If this book begins when she is 16 and ends when she's 25, I know her later memoirs are even more adventurous. Can't wait to get my hands on them. Throughout the book, she references all the people who encouraged her to write. I'm glad she took their advice.

[Negin · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you have a problem with judgmental reviews, then please stop reading here.

This is a memoir and obviously Lisa is free to keep out what she wants. Yet because I felt that it was patchy in certain areas and that some parts were omitted, I did some research.

One realizes early on in the book that Lisa had an eccentric background. Her mother had been married four times and had four children, one from each marriage.

Lisa meets her husband-to-be Jaime, who’s 20 years her senior, when she’s 16 on a London street. Obviously, Lisa was probably looking for a father figure, since I don’t think she ever had much of a relationship with her own father. I’m old and jaded enough to know that huge age disparities like that, especially when one is still a teen for crying out loud, seldom succeed. I remember an acquaintance telling me how his father had told him to not marry anyone with more than five years age difference on either side. I love rules, so I remember that one. But I digress.

So Lisa marries Jaime at 17, going against her mother’s warnings. He’s an aristo-leftie. I’ve known several and they amuse me. Yeah, yeah, they’ve had a privileged life and own a ton of land or whatever. They manage to find the time to love the concept of communism, which isn’t that hard for them to do, since they often have plenty of time on their hands. But what amuses me is that they seldom actually practice what they think they believe. That usually remains to be seen. Now, it gets better.

Jaime is a wanted man! He robs banks in Europe to raise money for guerrillas in Venezuela. What a worthy cause! Lisa, as a young newly-wed appears to get involved in the bank-robbing also. They leave Europe and move to his family’s ginormous estate in Venezuela (apparently the size of Scotland). The marriage was a nightmare and didn’t last. In fact, she never seems to have cared about him much from the beginning. She spends most of the memoir focusing on avocado growing or whatever. Maybe that’s her way of dealing with the pain. I don’t know. It just felt odd.

Time and time again I have seen daughters repeating the same pattern of exercising poor judgment when it comes to their choices in men. Not always, but often enough. Lisa appears to have repeated her mother’s pattern of getting married a few times. Also, Lisa and Jaime’s own daughter, Iseult, married a man who was 25 years older than her when she was very young also. Go figure. The cycle keeps repeating itself! By the way, in case you may be interested, the man that she married was a movie director (“Il Postino” and “White Mischief”) and that marriage failed as well. What’s interesting is Lisa’s description below of Jaime saying that he would die if she didn’t marry him, Lisa’s daughter said the exact same thing of the husband that was 25 years her senior. Yes, there is a pattern, a rather sad and pathetic one at that.

“He said he would die if I didn’t marry him. He said it was my destiny. I was sixteen and I didn’t know then that it was an old cliché, as though, somewhere, there is a little latino lexicon of courtship which is learnt by heart in adolescence and then regurgitated to girl after girl.”

The reason that I’m giving the book 2 stars is not based on all the foolish decision-making and her personality, which I really didn’t care for. I can handle that okay. Initially, I was excited and thought that the book would focus more on her crappy marriage, an absolute sham really. Yet reading it felt weird. I felt a great deal of detachment towards every single character and I didn’t care about anyone. I felt that so much of the focus was on the farming details and the workers. That started to get extremely slow for me. This is a memoir and she really doesn’t open up much to the reader.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I declare an interest. I own a farm in Latin America. It is much smaller than the one of which this author became the Doña for several years. Also, I came to my farm late in life, whereas when she came to hers she was teenager. Sometimes, when I walk the few hundred yards to the back of my land and look across the valley, I think of her doing the same in the early 1970s. The biggest difference is that when she did so, everything that she could see belonged to her (or, more accurately, the husband from the aristocratic Venezuelan family that she had married). She was mistress of the equivalent of a small province, with its own population, who – in time – looked to her for help.

When I came to my farm – also married – in 2003, it sometimes felt a daunting prospect to build a house, build a life, and manage the land. In reality, with a talented wife well-versed in local affairs, we have managed with very few calamities. Lisa St Aubin de Teran, on the other hand, seemed to have almost nothing going for her when she arrived on her massive estate. Her husband, lovingly attentive in Britain, became a stranger who disregarded the practicalities of life on the hacienda, was frequently absent and went progressively mad. The house where they should have lived had been rented out. Both his family and ‘la gente’ – the workers and inhabitants of the hacienda – regarded her as an oddity because of her youth and her strange Spanish. She clearly couldn’t be a proper ‘Dona’ for the hacienda.

Lisa seemed ill-equipped to cope with her husband, the family, the house, the land and the people. Yet cope she does. She somehow asserts control. She slumps frequently into highly understandable depression, yet climbs out of it again. She plants avocados, buys sheep, keeps an improbable range of pets (only some of which die) and eventually forms a household of which her husband is only a fleeting member – frequently locked in his room or leaving unannounced by a window. She manages eventually to gain the credentials of a proper wife by producing a daughter. And after a similar amount of time, she realises what role she has to assume: ‘la gente’ have numerous problems, they need someone to intervene on their behalf and provide some of the things they don’t have, and she decides she can help them and in the process gain their respect. In time she gains their love too, and as she says, her relationship with them was a formative one for her, and has enormously influenced her writing since then.

In this book, Lisa St Aubin de Teran not only describes her personal and fascinating struggle, but she captures much of the struggle which the lives of ‘la gente’ represent, too. She describes the land and the country with which she almost seems to have a love-hate relationship. And she gives us glances into the agonies she went through – and the rewards – of forging a life out of the most bizarre and unpromising ingredients.

When she eventually leaves, we sense her exhaustion. We are happy though – as maybe she was too – that she had had the experience. Without it there would be no ‘The Hacienda’ and we would have missed a brilliant piece of descriptive writing, adding mature afterthoughts to the those of a nevertheless strikingly capable and strong teenage girl who survived an experience that would have defeated most of her readers. It is a book worth going back to - as I just have.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow - pc broken.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with most of the books which I have been reading and reviewing of late, Lisa St Aubin de Teran's The Hacienda was chosen for my Around the World in 80 Books challenge. I have read a couple of the author's novels in the past, but have never come across any of her non-fiction before. This particular memoir, which begins when de Teran is just seventeen years old, has been described as 'extraordinary' and 'mesmerising'.

In the 1970s, whilst still a teenager, de Teran got married to a Venezuelan man, twenty years older than herself, whom she had a whirlwind romance with in London. She 'followed her new husband, South American aristocrat and bank robber, Don Jaime Teran, to his hacienda, deep in the Venezuelan Andes.' On the vast avocado and sugarcane plantation, she and Jaime live their different lives; she is left largely to fend for herself, with little knowledge of the local dialect. Despite this, she became 'la Dona', spending her time 'managing the estate, bearing her first child, handling her increasingly unstable husband, and living for seven years amongst la gente, an illiterate, feudal people', who are tithed to the estate. She writes of the way in which, despite her improvements of the estate for those who lived there, she was not accepted by the community until she had a child of her own, evidence of bonding 'physically with the clan I had married into.'

As de Teran finds it, the hacienda 'was a place without any clear dimensions: a frontierless tract of land steeped in history. When I asked what it was, I was always told it was in the Andes, never anywhere specific, just "en los Andes", as though this mythical hacienda were the heart, the living core of a great mountain range.' As the months pass, de Teran feels rather overwhelmed with the many ways in which her life has changed, and the different pace of life she finds: 'Time, it seemed, had warped on the hacienda and spun its web over all its sons and daughters. It spun its web over me.'

De Teran makes it clear that her expectations of Venezuela were not met when she first arrived in Caracas. She writes: 'I suppose I was expecting everything to fit the descriptions of a sugar plantation. The big, modern, bustling Americanised city of concrete highrises came as a total shock. Where was the jungle? Where were the snakes?... I felt completely disorientated. I began to imagine the hacienda as a place of concrete bowers wreathed in tropical flowers. I had braced myself to live in the wilds, instead I found myself in a place obsessed by the spending and display of wealth.'

Despite the many elements of interest which can be found within the pages of The Hacienda, I did not find it anywhere near as engaging as I was expecting to. De Teran has included many letters written to her mother throughout, which seem to have been slotted in at random, and which interrupt and take attention away from the threads of story that weave through the whole. I found The Hacienda to be both disjointed and distanced; it felt as though de Teran was constantly keeping things at arm's length, and distorting scenes. The strengths within the memoir were certainly the expressions of Venezuelan customs, the sometimes colossal cultural differences which de Teran identifies, and the impacts of the country's violent and tumultuous history. Quite scant information is given about the social and political climate in Venezuela, however; much of the information here is focused solely upon the hacienda, with little consideration of the country as a whole.

[Chrisl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will be remembering the abusive relationship. And the absurd contrast between the elite class of Venezuela and the impoverished hacienda workers. Had expected a more lighthearted memoir.

[Cassidy Brinn]

Enchanted.

I read this while living in rural Ghana and it was fascinating to see the similarities between these rural undeveloped (insert pc term here) villages, despite their major geographic differences.

The text struck a good balance between calm and lively, but I read it pretty quickly. After more time, I might well have gotten bored. Although maybe not. While the details and anecdotes can seem unconnected and perhaps monotonous, they manage to convey (very subtly) Lisa's journey from a clueless quirky girl into a confident woman.

My biggest complaint: she overemphasises her weakness and isolation. Those aspects are fun, but then it's confusing when a scene suddenly finds her at a café in the city with friends. We needed more victories to balance things out and keep the horrible horrifying. For example, she managed to become a nurse/pharmacist to the villagers. In the book she focuses almost exclusively on the times she wasn't able to help. The fact that she is running her little makeshift clinic is taken for granted and quickly passed over. Now, in Ghana, I sometimes felt bitterly overwhelmed when I had to interrupt my alone-time to give a kid a bandaid. I never went and bought stuff for them myself. When I went to the trouble to disinfect the cut first, I felt preeeeetty damn saintly. I'm just saying, doing that work is crazy demanding and also interesting and she might have focused on the good she was able to do and the times she felt strong. Humility? Salesemanship? Whatever, it made the book more boring than it should have been.

What remains though are the vivid anecdotes. It was a lovely book.

[Antonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished, breathless, the last chapter (no spoilers here); suffice it to say, I would have left Venezuela a long time prior to the assaults visited on animals and humans by Jaime Teran. I loved this story, but it seemed a little disjointed with things left out, obviously intentionally by the author; things too violent or frightening to relate? A memoir written years later with such perfect and wonderful details of the natural world on the hacienda and description of "la gente" but then the author leaves her reader wondering if this life on the hacienda is just a folly of youth and naiveté? There is a strong feeling of "let's hope she survives", the feeling of imminent death right up until the last page, and the endangerment of her child...all done purposefully. The prose is to the point, punctuated by letters home to her mother. Letters home: just as brief with the telling of white lies. I would have dumped the dishonesty and gotten on the first plane out of there. Still, can't say it wasn't a terrific read.

[Jennifer Pletcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the author's own story of her time in Venezuela. She spent 7 years on her husband's family's Hacienda. She was in her teens when she married a man in his 40s. Her husband has fled the country as a political criminal, and once he was able to return, he wanted to run the Hacienda himself. However - due to mental illness, or what could just be lack of care, he never did run the Hacienda. Lisa barely saw her husband, and when she did, he usually had a fit of rage. She spent 7 years trying to help run The Hacienda,and raise her daughter, before she finally escapes.

This was a pretty good book. I found it well written and was very intriqued with the story. A very young girl who was swept away by an older man who chased her constantly to marry him and then just leaves her to fend for herself. The trials she went through and the conditions she lived in will leave you bewildered and shaking your head. I cannot even imagine sticking it out as long as she did considering what she was dealing with. She didn't have the greatest upbringing or parental remodel so that could be part of it. I also wish she would have written more from when she left Venezuela and her life after her escape and how she recovered. But she didn't. So it left me wondering.

[John Gurney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir is so unexpected it reads like fiction. Teenage Englishwoman meets cash poor/land rich Venezuelan grandee, marries him and in the 1970s, moves to the isolated, rural hacienda that's been in his family for centuries. The hacienda is crumbling and Lisa St. Aubin de Teran plunges into a complex social situation, formed by a half millennium of tradition. Though she wants to befriend and help la gente, the people, of the gigantic property, they defer to her, are terrified of her, the new Doña, and most things new and foreign.

The book is richly narrated, yet the author's odd husband, the product of centuries of Teran family inbreeding, is only touched upon. Steeped in tradition, he essentially imprisons Lisa Teran and disappears for extended periods of philandering. In his evolving madness, he becomes a violent monster, yet the book is oddly dispassionate about the terrifying husband. My principal complaint about the book is that the domestic violence is only grazed on.

The hacienda has natural beauty and Lisa Teran brings agricultural improvements, yet, the hacienda is also an unhealthful place where peasants' and their children die in droves. A witchdoctor's errant prescription causes the ghastly death of her foreman's son. Venezuela reads as a terrible place. The arepas and other food sound mouth-watering, yet it is a land of extreme chauvinism, rampant corruption and poverty, intellectual backwardness, the world's most deadly drivers, and a place where small disputes are settled with guns and knives, a land where blood feuds last for generations. Women are chattel. Venezuela is a place of racism, where, like many former Spanish colonies, the lighter the skin tone, the better one's lot. "Free" Venezuelan health care is horrible; peasants see hospitals as a place to die and a clinic is nicknamed "La Guilotina" because patients seemingly die almost upon entry. Lisa Teran's harrowing near-death experience for her own baby in the Venezuelan health system imprinted itself in my mind.

A caring individual, Lisa Teran makes the best of her situation, and helps the unfortunates around her as best as she can. This story culminates with her coming to grips with a dire familial situation and her dream of escape.

[sun dancer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Hacienda is an autobiography which requires a patience, a kindness and mindfulness while reading. I admire the author's strength to tell this story which is layered so thickly in adventure, growth and desperation. Her narrative voice expresses her ruminated conflicts regarding this unbelievable part of her life. Writing this, I am not quite sure of the author's ultimate feelings for the 'hacienda', however Lisa St Aubin depicts the reality of life and the memories it leaves vividly, depicting the relatable difficulty of making sense of them.

To reiterate, it took me a month to read this book because its density in emotion mirrors how interminable her time felt there. It is a book you commit to but you finish it wanting to meet both Lisa and 'la gente'.

[Mereke · Rating 2 out of 5]

A memoir in which the writer does not allow you to know much about herself as a person and is generally fairly derogatory with respect to all the people around her. She's a fool to go to Venezuela, a fool to stay and a fool to tell us about it and expect us not to wonder what in the heck she was thinking when she married a man she didn't really care about one or another in the first place. I didn't find it enlightening or particularly interesting.

[Ashley Dong · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed her story and it was sad at points and I cant believe some of the things she had to endure as a wife and even as a mother. I didn't care for the way she wrote, like she left out certain details then later on in the book went back to the time we had already gone through. I also didn't care for the ending I would have liked to have known what became of her husband and how she actually got him to sign the papers.

[Loraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enthralling tale of a child-bride dropped by an unstable husband on a farm in the Venezuelan Andes. There are so many elements to this book: adventure, romance, abuse, passion, politics, patronage, etc. There are many questions and mysteries that are unanswered and unexplained that maybe add to the charm of this book

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teran's writing style is dry - leaving all of the emotional reactions up to the reader. Her writing is beautiful and will leave you wanting to read all of her work.

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a very odd book. I found the narrator to be something like poetic in her approach to recounting her story. Rather than a raw take on her life it is a very intentionally stylized read. While I didn't feel particularly empathetic or caring about any of the characters it was still an engaging read to hear about a life so far outside my own.

What I found a little hard to deal with was definitely the tone of superiority and pity that came with understanding 'la gente'. She wanted to help and make their lives better but she never takes off her colonial view and actually help you understand their point of view. They are always to be judged and improved which is very human to think but not terribly insightful. I certainly had my own feelings about the discussions about the value of women, how scared they were of outsiders, and the corrupt government. Maybe that is too much to ask though for an author to find redeeming qualities or a different lens to make it all more approachable. That probably wasn't her goal, I think I just enjoy books that do that more in memoirs.

[Jane Considine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd like to give this more than 3* but 4* wasn't exactly right either. This book has beautiful cover art, and it was sitting on my "to read" shelf for too long! A memoir, but sometimes it seemed like I was observing her life through a gauze curtain. The author was 17 in Lodon when she met and married an older Venezuelan man and went with him to live there where he operated a sugar plantation a tropical part of the country. And it turns out that he was quite unstable most of the time, but fortunately for Lisa he was also gone much of the time, she never knew for sure where he was or when he would be back. She created a life for herself, learning about the people who worked on the plantation, or were part of the community. She often provided medical care for them, learned about processing the sugar cane, managing the employees, growing a productive crop of avocado, providing veterinary care, raising a daughter, etc. And this all took place in the 1970s! Such a different world she lived in; she was very kind, creative and brave.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I read this memoir, I kept thinking the book would really have benefitted from a good editor. The reader is left with so many questions. To start with, why did this shy, dreamy 16 year old English girl marry an older political exile from Venezuela “in a public-spirited way: it seemed to mean a lot to him and it didn’t mean much to me”? With that impulsive marriage, she began a strange life; two years wandering in Europe with her husband Jaime and two of his friends, followed by 7 years on the hacienda, Jaime’s beautiful but primitive estate in the mountains of Venezuela. Sometimes the author is so reticent that it inhibits the flow of her story, but she offers an honest and thoughtful appreciation of the people of the hacienda and a picture of an older way of life surviving into the seventies.

[Darla Ebert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is ok, I was totally puzzled by the decision making of the author though I suppose her background gave her reasons for her bizarre choices. She seemed to be punishing herself somehow for some reason. At any rate, her deliberate choice to cut her losses and stay in such an off-putting environment where the cultural differences were huge and illogical, completely baffles the reader. I suppose for her, there were compelling reasons. For the purposes of entertainment and unexpected happenings, the tale works

[Angie Gazdziak · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was okay. I wanted to like this more than I did. It started interestingly enough, but then it got pretty boring. I felt like every plot point was given equal weight, so nothing really moved the story along after El Capino. This was a book someone gave me in HS; it was required reading for World Lit and I just never picked it up. Other books were always more interesting. This one started off okay, but then quickly became boring and dry.

[Bonmcmurray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned a lot about the people of the Venezuelan Andes. But the book was not that well written, and jumped around quite a bit. It was memorable for the local color and the myriad diseases and poverty she encountered. Also, her marriage was inexplicable. The Venezuelan man she married seemed to have undiagnosed mental illness and was not someone the reader could know or relate to. I think, from reading the Wikipedia page about the author, that she has written better books.

[The Farmer's Wife · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author just starts by explaining how her psychotic husband wooed and wed her. The audience has no idea who anyone is or why we should care about any of the story. I'm sure this woman's story is tragic and all that, but, books kinda need to be able to connect emotionally with the reader; and, unfortunately, that never happened.

[pea. · Rating 2 out of 5]

irritating & suffering an identity crisis... the time line... who she is... what the story is focusing on.
why I thought an earlier memoir of hers would be better than the later one I previously read I do not know... i must vet my want to read list more carefully.

[Didier Delahaye · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was curious at first, but I stopped caring half-way through.
The author's tale would likely be of interest to those familiar with her work, but it doesn't stand up that well on its own. To be fair, I have been spoiled by Isabel Allende's writings.

[Leo W. · Rating 2 out of 5]

It just never got going or went anywhere at all.

[Zabette · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the weirdest, most compelling, stranger-than-fiction memoirs I have ever read.

[Bent Andreassen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gives a good view into life and culture in Venezuela.

[Kszr · Rating 4 out of 5]

well written, but with many gaps about the seven years she spent in Venezuela. Left with more questions than answers.

[Susan Thomason · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an amazing story of resilience and courage in spite of a difficult life. The author brings the landscape of Venezuela to life with characters and hacienda life.

[Anna Juliet Stephens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a desire to read a book about adventure, about South America, with poetry and romance intertwined with culture and I found exactly that in The Hacienda. It was a page turner for me from the very beginning. Having spent two years living in remote parts of South America and some time with an indigenous community I found Lisa's descriptions of la gente - the community in the Venezualan Andes - real and authentic. It invoked nostalgia and reminded me of some of my own experiences, which I thought were highly adventurous at the time but surely pale in comparison to such a radical change in lifestyle as just a teenager/young adult. Lisa does a great job of capturing the isolation and intrigue that arises following a decision to move from a city to a new community as an foreigner - an outsider. Some chapters were distressing, but insightful into life in one of the poorer communities in Venezuala (in stark contrast to the flashy upper-class suburbs). I give it 5 stars for eloquent writing, adventure and authenticity.