Bookish Thoughts

It took me a while to get in to this book, but that was more an issue of timing than the book itself. I shouldn't start epic tomes when I know I'm going to be too busy to read for a week. When I did manage to sink into the story, I got a fun, swashbuckling adventure about an idealistic young man. Which is exactly what I wanted. I particularly enjoyed the narrator of this book. The mystery of her identity (which I figured out long before she revealed herself, as the book expected me to) was a fun hook dragging me through some of the more tedious sections. And her occasional snarky asides added some fun flavor to the book. I loved when the narrator is a character, and Allende did an excellent job of that here. The only thing this book is really lacking is a sequel. Just when it was really getting good, when Diego de la Vega had fully embraced his identity as Zorro and completed his first mission, the book ended. This was more of an origin tale than a series of adventures. And...

I discovered Isabel Allende about a year ago, and I've really liked her books so far. I was prepared to fall head over heels in love with this one, which is the one everyone always references when they talk about her. Unfortunately that didn't quite happen. But I think it had more to do with mismatched expectations than the book itself. This is Allende's first novel, and I had to remind myself of that while I was reading it. It's not quite as polished as some of her later works. I particularly had trouble with the shifting narrators. The book shifts between two first person narratives. But the identity of the second narrator is revealed so late in the book (and looking back, refers to herself in the third person more often than not) that there might as well have been three narrators. Except that the epilogue makes it pretty clear there were only two. When I wasn't struggling with who was telling the story, I mostly enjoyed it. It's an epic family saga, set a...

I've only read two of Isabel Allende's books, but I've already come to expect a lot from her as an author. Those two books were so good, amazingly structured and filled with fully-realized characters. I loved everyone from the protagonists to the third-string characters. Even the characters I didn't like felt like complete people, which complicated my feelings in wonderful ways. And The Japanese Lover  didn't quite measure up. I think part of it may be that she was working with a different translator. There were glimpses of the lyrical language I'd become accustomed to, but they were few and far between. But it was more than that. This book felt unfinished. It wandered and jumped didn't flow as well as I wanted it to. It tried a bit too hard to be hip to current culture in the modern-day sections (perhaps Allende should stick to historical fiction?). It felt like whole chapters were missing, chapters that would make me care more about these characters and...

Well I'm officially in love with Isabel Allende. She writes beautiful, lyrical, romantic historic fiction with incredibly real characters. It brings the history alive, and her tendency to branch out and explore the lives of secondary characters allows for a lot of sympathy as well as multiple reactions to the events she writes about. Island Beneath the Sea follows Zarité (aka Tété), a woman born into slavery on Saint-Domngue. She lives through the Haitian Revolution before moving with her master to New Orleans, where she eventually achieves freedom for herself and her children. Tété is a wonderful character, strong and fierce and intelligent. She makes incredible sacrifices for the sake of her children, doing everything in her power to keep her family together. Her resilience is astounding, as is the naivete of her master, who is sure that the two of them have a bond that goes deeper than owner and property (mostly because he's the owner and has the luxury of delusion). ...

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. ...