The Dark Star of Itza: The Story of a Pagan Princess by Alida Malkus (published 1930) is a 1931 Newbery honor novel featuring ancient Mayan traditions in a story of the city of Chicken Itza. Nicté is the only daughter of the high priest and has visionary abilities as she gazes into a dark stone. She sees only death and destruction in the future when the king Chac Zib Chac asks for what will happen if he chooses to take the bride-to-be of Hunac Ceel for his own bride. Nevertheless, the king ignores her, and on comes the destruction: a siege, the fall of the city of Chichen, slavery for the survivors, and Nicté’s own role in question.
The author’s foreword suggests that these are facts translated into Spanish records from the book Chilam Balam (see Wikipedia for all I know), which was written after the Spanish conquest. So did these things really happen? Malkus paints a story to match these traditions, including the ritual human sacrifices and plenty of rape and pillaging from the victors.
I’ll start with what I liked. Malkus does create a world that seems consistent. I read the forward again after I read the novel and it does seem to line up with what the tradition tells. The writing was sufficient and some descriptions of the setting are beautifully written. I also saw some of the Mayan traditions I’ve read about portrayed, such as the game Tzatzli (the rubber ball game played to the death). There is a nice twist at the end of the novel that I liked a lot.
For me, however, there were far too many negatives. The book as a whole moved so slowly. I struggled to get into it and disliked the characters in the beginning. The entire pagan religion felt foreign and made-up, especially in the very beginning when Nicté is starring into the stone and going in to a trance to see the future. Malkus made up a Mayan language and wrote it in poetry, which was also very strange. As is always the case with historical fiction from a different culture, society must have simply imagined. Further, the author used terms like “Khan” to refer to leaders and “baptism” to refer to a ritual with the babies, which seemed very anachronistic for a novel that took place in the Americas in the 1300s or thereabout, far away from the term Khan or Christianity.
And then there was the violence. A good portion of the book was not violent. However, there are plenty of scenes and reference to human sacrifice and other things. It is a book about a war and conquering, so the author holds very little back. There is a scene when our main character happens to glance out her window and see a human being sacrificed with the heart torn from the warm body. Then the body is torn limb from limb. Our heroine screams. I’d hope so, but the author writes about human sacrifice so matter-of-factly, I wondered how our main character felt about it at other points in the story too. At another point, Nicté is luckily rescued from being raped but the language says others were. It was a shock to read in a book supposedly for children, even for 1930s children.
Can you imagine reading this with a child today?
“Mommy, what does dismembered mean?”
“Mommy, what does it mean that they were raping the women?”
Obviously, I cannot recommend The Dark Star of Itza as a story to be read today, especially to children.
ETA: I understand that each book has the appropriate audience, and this is not a book for younger children. Still, given the qualms I already have about the non-authentic stereotypes in the book, the questionable content, and the slow pace, I still don’t see this as a book to be read today to children. I cannot recommend it.
