Daughter of Fortune

This book was absolutely gorgeous. I picked it up without knowing anything about it because Isabelle Allende is Jane's favorite author on Jane the Virgin. I'd been wanting to wade into the romance genre and this seemed like as good a place as any to start. That said, I'm not sure this qualifies as a romance. Then again, I don't really know enough about the genre to make a claim like that.

Regardless of whether it's a romance (and it does have true love and a happy ending, which is probably enough to qualify), it's also a wonderfully rich and beautiful coming-of-age tale set during the San Francisco gold rush. Eliza is a young Chilean girl, adopted and raised by Anglican parents to be a proper, upper-class Christian. But when she finds herself pregnant, she throws caution to the wind and follows her lover to San Francisco, certain that they're destined to be together.

The language of this book is stunning, particularly when Allende describes young love. She fleshes out the lives of the people surrounding Eliza, particularly her adoptive mother, Rose, and her Chinese friend Tao Chi'en. This gives the book an incredible scope and allows for a perspective on the American West that I knew existed but had never really immersed myself in. It made me want to know more about the history of San Francisco, which seems to exist as a perpetual boom-town.

It also made me want to seek out more books by Isabelle Allende in particular and Latin authors in general. I didn't like One Hundred Years of Solitude when I tried to read it a few years back, and it turned me off of magical realism in general for a while. This book reminded me that I should let one boring tome spoil an entire genre and reminded me of all the stories I loved so much in my high school Spanish classes. I'm definitely going to be on the lookout for more.

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