The best way I can describe this book is that it narrates events without passion or urgency, in an unnamed country, through the eyes of a narrator we never come to know. My memory of that book is nothing at all like my experience with Violeta. It's been a long time since I've read an Isabel Allende novel, but I do recall loving The House of the Spirits back in the day. Told through the eyes of a woman whose unforgettable passion, determination, and sense of humor will carry her through a lifetime of upheaval, Isabel Allende once more brings us an epic that is both fiercely inspiring and deeply emotional. Her life will be shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and, ultimately, not one but two pandemics.
She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, times of both poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. Her family loses all and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. From the start, her life will be marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family of five boisterous sons. This sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.
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