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San Francisco Chronicle
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Isabel Allende's latest strong female protagonist is a S.F. journalist
Bestselling 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 Marin County, 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.
New Indian Express
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Book Review: Isabel Allende's latest strong female protagonist is a journalist
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.
Washington Post
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Isabel Allende's new novel sends an adventurous reporter to war
Isabel Allende often finds thematic inspiration in her lived experience of revolution. She fled political persecution in Chile after a coup in 1973 deposed President Salvador Allende, her father's cousin. While in exile in Venezuela, she achieved renewal and personal liberation through professional success. She published her critically acclaimed best-selling debut, 'The House of the Spirits,' in 1982. Her new novel, 'My Name Is Emilia del Valle,' returns to her childhood home of Chile, though the story begins in San Francisco's Mission District in 1866. Here, an Irish nun finds sanctuary after a failed love affair with a Chilean aristocrat. Taken in by a local teacher, whom she marries, she gives birth to a daughter she names Emilia. The girl is raised by her mother and stepfather to think for herself and find meaningful work, and Emilia ends up making a living by writing popular pulp fiction and a column for the San Francisco Daily Examiner under the pen name Brandon J. Price. Emilia and her family 'spent hours coming up with the most macho name we could think of,' she explains. When civil war breaks out in Chile in 1891, Emilia seizes the chance to cover the revolution and find her birth father. Along with another reporter from the Examiner, she travels to Chile, begins an affair with her colleague, meets her estranged father and embeds with government forces supporting Chilean President José Manuel Balmaceda, an autocrat dressed as a reformer. She's got a gut feeling about Balmaceda's claims that his reforms will benefit everyone in Chile, that 'Balmaceda was fighting for the rights of the common man, trying to break the iron grip of the aristocracy. And yet I had heard that he did so with a shocking brutality.' She's determined to report whether the rumors are true. Emilia is soon caught up in Balmaceda's paradox. Her fraught journey of romance and self-discovery pivots desperately to survival when Balmaceda's army is defeated. The 1891 civil war in Chile was described by military historian Lt. Col. Don P. Wyckoff as a 'unique civil war — a navy without an army opposing an army without a navy — an elephant in conflict with a whale.' Emilia's journalism is part and parcel of the story's narrative. We learn, as her readers do, that Balmaceda's reform policies are quickly opposed not only by his political enemies, but also by his own ministers. The root of the conflict was fiscal policy: Balmaceda wanted to eliminate domestic tax revenue and fund his reform programs with duties collected from British mining companies. And when he moved to do so without congressional approval, a constitutional crisis quickly devolved into violent confrontation, with the Chilean Navy supporting the congressional rebels and Balmaceda commanding the army. Emilia's reports from the battlefield offer a stark counterpoint to the policy debates over taxes and tariffs. She sees it as her job 'to collect the dispersed fragments' of stories for thousands of men who would die on the battlefield and never get to tell theirs. 'It is impossible to describe the horror of war,' she writes. 'How is it possible that, from the dawn of their presence on earth, men have systematically set out to murder one another? What fatal madness do we carry in our soul? That propensity toward destruction is the original sin.' Allende offers readers a deeply researched historical adventure, excavating both romantic and journalistic exploits with verve and passion. But it is the story's prescient alignment with our current cultural and civic upheaval that lands like a mortar from Allende's epic depiction of the Battle of Concón. The United States is in a paroxysm of tariff-induced economic crisis, market collapse, frenzied political stasis, and battles for institutional power and control over individual citizens, native and foreign. From that vantage, Chile's history (including the role of foreign interests) and Emilia's story offer an essential lesson. If history and a free press illuminate a revolution's explosion of civil norms, literature reveals the human triumph, vanity and tragedy of revolution's impact. The upheaval that Emilia del Valle recounts in 1891 is our clarion call in 2025. Marcela Davison Avilés is a multimedia producer and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. By Isabel Allende Ballantine. 304 pp. $30
Hamilton Spectator
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
Book Review: Isabel Allende's latest strong female protagonist is a journalist
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. ___ AP book reviews:
San Francisco Chronicle
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Book Review: Isabel Allende's latest strong female protagonist is a journalist
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. ___
