Spoiled with beauty, riches, and adoration, a young girl from Àvila is sent to a convent by her parents to learn discipline, but discovers instead an unparalleled spiritual fervor-- one so powerful as to be condemned as sinful by some. She is Saint Teresa--known as a mystic, reformer and founder of convents, and the author of numerous texts that introduced her radical religious ideas and practices to a society suffering through the repressive throes of the Spanish Inquisition. In Barbara Mujica’s masterful tale, her story--her days of youthful romance, her sensual fits of spiritual rapture, secret heritage as a Jewish convert to Catholicism, cloak-and-dagger political dealings, struggles against sexual blackmail, and mysterious illness--unfolds with a tumultuous urgency. Blending fact with fiction in vivid detail, painstakingly researched and beautifully rendered, Mujica's tale conjures a brilliant picture of sisterhood, faith, the terror of religious persecution, the miracle of salvation, and to one woman's challenge to the power of strict orthodoxy, a challenge that consisted of a crime of passion--her own personal relationship with God.