Hearn paints a colorful portrait of life in the marshy Gulf Coast city of New Orleans, focusing on a young white girl who is adopted by a Spanish family.

Written during a ten-year stay in New Orleans, Chita was Lafcadio Hearn's first novel. It is filled with beautiful language and emotion, and evokes a true sense of the location and the era.

Images are expertly imbued into the mind by vivid description. In Chita, Hearn paints life on a marshy, eclectic Gulf Coast island in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Chita is a young white girl who is orphaned by a shipwreck and then adopted by a Spanish family on the island. Languages, cultures, and people collide and meld into a nebulous, but distinctive, way of life.

Author Lafcadio Hearn was a man who wrote with perception and flair about the exotic places he was inexplicably drawn to.