In the opening pages of The Maid’s Daughter, a novel that helped win the Planeta Prize in Madrid in 1977 for Sonsoles Ónega, it becomes clear that the work targets a broad audience with accessible entertainment. Yet it remains fair to judge its literary merit with the same rigor applied to any major work. The comparison to judging a burger against a tasting menu at a renowned restaurant underscores the idea that different criteria apply, but readers still expect value. Here is a closer look.
The core knot of the plot reveals itself from the start: a wealthy Indian family’s master impregnates the mansion’s caretaker, who gives birth to a daughter the same night his wife welcomes a different child. The maid then makes a dramatic decision, swapping the infants to secure a better life for her own daughter. Beyond these immediate events, the story maps the main characters and traces their journeys, weaving personal adventures with the sweeping history of Spain and Cuba across the twentieth century.
On one side, the author presents strong women, while on the other, she depicts men who are often timid, wavering, and morally flawed. From the adulterer’s mother who runs a Cuban family business and faces tragedy after a worker’s death tied to her husband, to the wife who emerges as a fearless entrepreneur and builds a thriving canning operation, the female characters rise with vitality and resilience. The daughter, raised within wealth, becomes a sharp manager steering the family enterprises forward. Yet among the upper-class characters, courage and agency are more pronounced than among those from lower social strata. The narrative nods to the honest, working women of the Galicia canneries, while portraying lower-class women who exhibit guile or harm to the protagonist’s circle. The maid who swaps the babies, the scheming Cuban worker who becomes entangled with his employer, a medium with unsettling powers who wishes misfortune on the family, and even a daughter born out of wedlock—all inhabit a landscape where jealousy, desire, and power collide. The men, meanwhile, are shown as emotionally blocked, pulled by temptations and a lack of resolve.
The novel leans into classic soap opera elements designed for escapist appeal. Misfortunes among noble families, romances, deaths, business triumphs and failures, incest, shipwrecks, arranged marriages, travel, and a central figure who wields influence in tandem with history itself all populate the pages. Yet despite abundant dialogue that keeps the pace brisk, the journalist’s narrative sometimes loses grip on sustained tension. After a certain point, the momentum wavers, with the male lead’s limited footprint and the evolving plot contributing to a lull. As the story progresses, more characters discover the secret, and the town becomes abuzz with speculation, yet both mother and daughter fail to sense danger. The ongoing movement of people and fortunes also dulls emotional impact. Romantic bonds struggle to carry real weight, and those relationships that do show potential progress slowly, predictably, and with little depth from seed to consequence. A notable flaw is Ónega’s handling of intensity; moments with real dramatic potential are flattened through brief, aimless exchanges that lack purpose. Even scenes that hint at discomfort, such as a pregnancy within incestuous ties, are treated with surprising ease, preventing authentic emotional resonance from taking hold.
In sum, The Maid’s Daughters often feels like a performance that improvises twists as it goes yet ends up mattering little to the reader. Despite attempts to align the prose with time and place—leaning more toward Galicia than Cuba—the dialogue can appear stiff, and the narrator’s moralistic stance sometimes overdoes the certainty of knowing better. Phrases like “We’ll do it for no reason” recur, and a few lines restate familiar notions, such as “the truth always beats the lie,” sometimes without clear source. A recurring pattern echoes a prior prize work: characters frequently act “within themselves,” a motif in which they groan, muse, whisper, hum, sing, and even spell, often with a hint of irony about sincerity.
Overall, the burger size is solid, and the toppings are abundant, yet the taste falls flat. The result is a novel that, while ambitious and entertaining, may leave readers craving more emotional impact and sharper, more intentional prose.