Spoiled with beauty, riches, and adoration, a young girl from Ávila is sent to a convent by her parents to learn discipline, but discovers instead an unparelleled spiritual fervor--one so powerful as to be condemned by some as sinful. 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 Bárbara Mujica's masterful tale, her story--days of youthful romance, fits of spiritual rapture, secret Jewish heritage, cloak-and-dagger political dealings, struggles against sexual blackmail, and mysterious illness--unfolds with a tumultuous urgency. 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 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.