In the searing and aptly titled The Ogre's Daughter, her first novel to be translated into English, French author Catherine Bardon (Les Deracines) imagines the tragic life of Flor de Oro Trujillo, the first daughter of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal and ruthlessly ambitious dictator of the Dominican Republic, to survive childhood. Flor is born in 1915 in the Dominican Republic. When she is young, her father is an army officer, but he realizes his bloody plans to attain power and the presidency by 1930. His reign lasts 31 years, and Flor spends every one of them wrestling with the love and hate she harbors for "El Jefe," a ranking member in history's pantheon of bloodthirsty tyrants.
In Bardon's deft hands, Flor is a lost soul orbiting her father, watching helplessly as she becomes the oldest sibling of her father's increasingly large family of legitimate and illegitimate children. When she shows the smallest signs of rebellion, El Jefe punishes her repeatedly with exile and emotional alienation. Bardon follows Flor's love life (she marries nine times) and her escalating problems with alcoholism and anorexia, portraying them as temporary escapes from Flor's circumscribed life. The historical lowlights of Trujillo's reign are presented subtly, as if they are accidents along the road that Flor cranes her neck to look at briefly before driving on. In The Ogre's Daughter, Bardon shows a bleak but fiery simulacrum of the historical Flor de Oro, and pays tribute to a nation that was just as damaged by the "implacable dictatorship" of "the Ogre of the Caribbean." --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver