by Cathryn_Conroy: This is a good book. It is very well written with an interesting—and at times fascinating—historical plot. But it just doesn’t sing. It’s good but not great.
Written by Isabel Allende, this is the story of a young woman named Emilia del Valle. It’s the late 1800s in San Francisco, California. Emilia is the child of a woman of Irish descent named Molly Walsh and Gonzalo Andrés del Valle. Molly was a young and naive novitiate nun preparing to take her final vows when she met the reprobate rascal del Valle, a wealthy Chilean aristocrat, who took untoward advantage of her. But it was a happy ending for Molly who married a kind and caring man named Don Pancho Claro, who loved and cherished Emilia as his own. But Molly’s bitterness toward del Valle only grew over the years, and she desperately wanted her daughter to find her biological father so she could receive her rightful inheritance.
Emilia defies societal conventions, almost to the point of unbelievability. She writes “dime novels” under a man’s pseudonym and finagles her way into a job for the Daily Examiner, a San Francisco newspaper. Eventually she and her reporting partner, Eric Whelan, are sent to Chile to report on the bloody and violent Chilean Civil War of 1891. Eric embedded with the rebels, while Emilia was to report on the government’s side, which was led by President José Manuel Balmaceda.
The bulk of the novel is Emilia and Eric’s experiences in Chile, which are terrifying, horrifying, and romantic. When the rebels are victorious, Emilia is placed in mortal danger since she is perceived as having sided with the government.
While this is primarily historical fiction about the goriness and travesties of war, it is also a book about Emilia’s fight for independence in a time when this was not allowed by societal conventions. And while Emilia’s quest to discover her inner self is quite imaginative, it defies the reality of the historical times in which the book is set.
Again, this is a good book—just not a great one.
