Daughter of Fortune

Isabel Allende gifted me a love for words. I remember picking her up while I was an intern at a newspaper, at a time when I was bored to death with writing obituaries. I started with Eva Luna, and it was like an explosion. That such beautiful and passionate prose came from the imagination of a former journalist, perhaps even a former obituary writer, blew my mind.

Since then I've read several of her works, the best of which has been House of Spirits. Allende's got this special way of mixing magic and history, and I can't get enough of it, even though her last few books, including Daughter of Fortune, has left unsatisfied my crave for her wizardry.



Set in the mid-nineteenth century, Daughter of Fortune chronicles the life of Eliza Sommers, a British-Chilean orphan, as she abandons her rigid, upper-class world in Valparaiso for the gold-crazed California. Typical of Allende, this heroine's reason for doing so is love... or at least, the illusion of love.

After learning she is pregnant, Eliza secretly leaves her stern aunt and uncle to locate her lover, a gold-hungry peasant with revolutionary ideals. She barely survives the harrowing journey to California, a land made chaotic and seemingly unprincipled by the waves of newcomers looking for wealth. It's in this land of "freedom" that Allende explores issues of gender and race. Eliza, who for her own safety dresses like a man, slowly finds her yearning for lost lover replaced by that for her best friend, Tao Chi'en, an eastern medicine practitioner who's calling in life is to rescue young Chinese women from San Francisco's brothels.

The story really is fantastic, and it's packed with all the things I love in a novel: romance, adventure, history and politics. But it contains only an ounce of magical realism, which is Allende's forte, and the main reason why I so admire her. There's less fire, less poetry.. and it's just not as beautiful as it should have been.