This is a fascinating exploration of the little-known world of African slaves and freedmen in Roman Catholic confraternities in late colonial Rio de Janiero. The narrative moves almost as a detective story following Soares's efforts to understand an intriguing document that she found in Brazil's National Library. The manuscript in question was a late eighteenth-century dialogue between an African originally from the ‘Kingdom of Maki’ on the Mina coast (today the Bight of Benin) and fellow members of his African confraternity in Rio de Janeiro. For Soares, encountering this dialogue sparked an investigation into the individuals in the congregation and their disputes with their own members as well as with other African groups in the city. In following this quest, Soares illuminates the cultural and social background of slaves and free blacks in colonial Rio de Janeiro, a subject that is sorely in need of investigation. The book is divided into two parts, each of three chapters. The first half analyses the African portion of this history, including Portuguese exploration and the slave trade, especially on the Mina coast. Soares is interested in how the slaves formed identities in the New World; she argues that names like ‘Maki’ and ‘Mina’ reflect a constructed identity shared among captives within a particularly American context, rather than an expression of culture brought unchanged from Africa. The second section of the book examines how the Mina Maki identity was constructed in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro among slaves and freed blacks. Throughout her analysis she presents an outstanding discussion of the role of lay religious confraternities in late colonial Brazilian society, and how these brotherhoods both indoctrinated slaves and freed blacks while simultaneously offering them a space to create their own communities. This very fine work will serve as a model for the burgeoning history of Roman Catholic confraternities in colonial Latin America. It will be of interest to scholars of subaltern groups throughout Latin America, as well as to those interested in African diaspora studies. The excellent translation by Jerry D. Metz makes the book easily accessible, despite the meticulous and complex nature of Soares's analysis. Highly recommended.