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When first picking up the book Malintzin’s Choices, I thought this would be a book completely about Malintzin and the life she led. I thought it would be definitive book that answered questions and would be a story about a woman that I’ve heard mentioned in the classroom so many times, with little information other than she was Cortes’ mistress. I thought that it would be a novel, where the author would most likely add what could have happened, but I didn’t expect the author to continually say that she honestly didn’t know what happened. This book would then have to classified as a historical non-fiction. Townsend obviously knows a lot about the time and the women during that time, but what she doesn’t know is about Malintzin’s life. 

There is a lot of speculation about what could have happened in her life (on pages 135,136,138), but she does reveal what options as an Indian woman she had. The title of the book tells you right away that it is about the conquest of Mexico, which is the region where I would classify this book. That isn’t to say that she does not talk at length about other regions, just that her focus is Mexico. Also she tries to tell us about a woman she doesn’t know by talking about what she does know. First being Cortes and his life and second being what she knows about Native American culture, which would be the final category that this book could be characterized under. Townsend can say only so much about this mysterious person we know so little of, but she tries to give readers an understanding of what she went through, what she could have done, the decisions she made, and what could have determined them.