Book Review: Isabel Allende’s latest strong female protagonist is a journalist

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Best-selling author Isabel Allende has been beloved for decades by millions of passionately loyal readers for her strong female protagonists and epic story lines stretching across the Americas.

In novels such as “The House of the Spirits," “Eva Luna,” and more recently, “Violeta,” indomitable women take center stage and drive dramatic narratives conjured into being with a splash of magic realism by the writer who was born in Peru and raised in Chile.

It’s no different in Allende’s latest book, “My Name is Emilia del Valle,” which features an adventurous journalist in San Francisco during the late 1800s. Young Emilia is surprisingly intrepid for a female of her time, challenging and vaulting over gender barriers as she moves from writing cheap novels under a male pseudonym to pushing for her real byline — as a woman — to be published above her newspaper articles.

Much of Emilia’s intellectual curiosity and confidence comes from her stepfather, a Spanish speaking schoolteacher who marries her pregnant mother, a novice Catholic nun abandoned after a romance with a wealthy Chilean aristocrat.

Although Allende initially sets her story in the United States, she gradually moves the action to Chile when Emilia persuades a newspaper editor to let her travel to the South American country to help cover Chile’s civil war, emphasizing her Spanish language skills.

She’s dispatched along with fellow newspaper correspondent Eric Whelan, who will focus on the main news while she handles the features.

Along with the professional challenge, Emilia wants to learn more about the father she has never known, and herself. Once in Chile, Emilia faces extreme dangers she has never imagined and questions where she came from and where she’s going.

It’s a story likely to be appreciated by the legions of Allende fans who have ensured she’s considered the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author. Although the Chilean-American novelist is fluent in English, and has long lived in California, she writes in her native Spanish and her books are translated.

The recipient of Chile’s National Literature Prize in 2010, Allende is considered an American literary treasure as well. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2014.

Allende previous novel, “The Wind Knows My Name,” published in 2023, was a departure from her familiar tales featuring strong women. In that book, she braided the stories of two young children traveling alone in different times and places – one during the brewing Holocaust in Europe and the other in modern day Arizona on the border with Mexico.

But all of Allende’s books, “My Name is Emilia del Valle” included, have the epic feel of a major Hollywood film, the kind of production that everyone will tell you must be seen on the big screen to be truly appreciated.

Reading the book, you can almost see young Emilia on the steamboat headed south to Chile, the land at the foot of the volcanos that holds her roots, and her destiny.

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