As the book opens, Tenamaxtli, his mother and grandfather have come from their homeland of Aztlan (over on the Pacific coast, and still not under the thumb of the Spanish) to the city formerly known as Tenochtitlan (the original of which was razed by the Spaniards and they're now building their own City of Mexico on its site).

The Conquistadors haven't totally wiped out all pockets of resistance from the locals, but they're firmly entrenched and are putting their stamp on both the lands and the peoples. Unsurprisingly, a sequel to Jennings' Aztec, although it's more of a sequel of theme & place rather than of character - there are just a few, minor holdovers from the first book, and the first book's narrator, Mixtli (in fact the father of this book's narrator, Tenamaxtli, although Tenamaxtli doesn't know it at the time) has a brief but memorable cameo in the opening pages of the book ( as the conquering Spaniards burn him at the stake for some of the things he told them while narrating the original book). There are some slow bits… but the detailed historical parts are interspersed with fairly frequent (and often completely ridiculous) sleazy, sleazy sex scenes. In reality, I don’t believe any one leader was responsible for the various local peoples’ resisting invasion, slaughter and enslavement – but it makes for a decent story. In the book, Tenamaxtli is the man responsible for organizing the Mixtón War ( ).

In a graphic opening scene, Tenamaxtli views his father being burned to death by the Spaniards, for heresy, and develops a desire for revenge which will determine the course of his entire life. This book tells the story of Tenamaxtli, the son of the narrator of the previous book, whom he never knew. There’s also a lot of historical detail in them – but, I wouldn’t actually *trust* any particular detail in any of these to be historically accurate without looking it up and verifying it in a couple of other sources first. So – I knew what I was getting into, with this book. I read the first one in this series a few years back, and enjoyed it enough to pick up the sequels.

Azteca gary jennings espanol