In 1898, Lady Kate Ashley breaks off her engagement to an older nobleman (shortly before their wedding, which was to be attended by the royal family) and leaves for British Honduras to find her father, a famous archeologist on the brink of discovering a lost city in the jungles. There she encounters a handsome young American archeologist, a fiery and wicked lady who runs a sugar plantation beyond the reach of the British, and a mysterious Mayan wizard who appears as both an old and a young man and who calls to her in her dreams, beckoning her to embrace the identity of an ancient Mayan goddess.
“Diosa” is a ridiculous Gothic potboiler of a book that plays fast and loose with history, geography, and plot. The “Mayan” artifacts Kate’s father is trying to … er … preserve all have Aztec names, a volcano gets moved into Belize that has no business being there, and a brutal slave uprising is spun up out of whole cloth. There’s a general undercurrent of casual racism toward Africans and Mayans, who alternate between noble savages and savage beasts, and the archeological practices of the characters are, well, not good.
But it’s a fun book, if you can overlook all of those shortcomings. (It requires a good deal of squinting to look pas the Mayan/Aztec conflation, the ridiculous geography, and the unexamined racism.) Kate has some wild adventures, and there are some big set pieces — a bacchanal on the beach when the British try to spirit away a giant stone head, a raging river rescue, a fight in the cellar of a burning sugar mill, a climactic earthquake that reburies the lost city — that are cinematic and exciting. Published in 1978, “Diosa” fits right in with “Indiana Jones” (there’s a crystal skull!) and “Romancing the Stone” as a fun if problematic romp.
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