Wide embracing view of early California and Chile

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	• Daughter of Fortune Isabel Allende, 2000 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 398 reviews view larger image
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Captivating Read!

This was my first book by Isabel Allende and I am now hooked. She is a great story teller, seemlessly weaving all the characters together, while transporting the reader to all the locales in the story. I have recommended this book to my friends and family. I also recommend Potrait in Sepia which is a continuation of this great story. Looking forward to reading more of her books!

Clean, Passionate and Adventurous!

I loved this book, "Isabel Allende Daughter of Fortune!" It is a clearly written, well developed story about an orphaned Chilean woman who follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. It becomes apparent that the search for her lover becomes an impossible mission, but instead she finds the fabric of which she's made and discovers a new life of promise. I found myself living "the adventure" in Eliza's shoes, smelling the musty stench of fish nets on the cargo boat and visualize the wrinkley face lines of Dr. Tao Chi'en who becomes an unlikely friend and confidant to Eliza. I loved this book! I plan to re-read this book once I finish my new series, Amy Tan.

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Lyrical storytelling!

I have read books that I can appreciate, but just not get into. This is not one of those books. I was gripped from Page 1. Allende truly draws us into the world of Eliza, a teenage girl growing up in Chile, adopted by English siblings. Eliza's restlessness over wanting love, thinking she's found it, losing it, wanting to find it, and yet longing for something other than love, maybe an escape from the rigid way of life of late 19th Century Chile, takes her -- and us -- on a wild adventure where she -- and we -- meet all sorts of people from all over the world.

I liked that while it was a gorgeously told coming-of-age story, Daughter of Fortune was also something of a historical novel, and a very good one at that. As an American kid, I learned the watered-down Americentric version of the Gold Rush in California, and certainly didn't learn much of Chilean history. But in this book, Allende seems to get inside the head of not only her Chilean characters, but characters from all over the world, showing us their ways and teaching us their beliefs.

A ripping great yarn, beautifully told, with some history thrown in (but not so much as to seem like a fancy textbook) -- what more could you want? I highly recommend this book, and am eager to read more by Allende.

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Wide embracing view of early California and Chile

This was my first Isabel Allende book and I just finished reading Zorro by her too. Both were great books giving a broad exposure to early California, Chile and Spain. I would highly recommend them.

Historical adventure

"Everyone is born with some special talent, and Eliza Sommers discovered early on that she had two: a good sense of smell and a good memory."

This is how "Daughter of Fortune" starts, but this excerpt may be as well considered the core of her narratives, as each one of her characters has a talent that she or he has to discover, develop and make use of.

The action spans from 1843 to 1853, but there are many references made to previous and future events that shape the narrative. The action is not confined geographically, but it spawls across four cultures: Chilean, English, Chinese and American. It is a web of stories, characters, dreams, hopes, and misfortunes that keep the reader utterly attentive and greedy for more.

The story is that of Eliza Sommers, who has questions about her identity and provenience, as she was found on the threshold of her aunt and uncles' house in Valparaíso, Chile. She spends her childhood between the Victorian education, life-style, musical evenings, piano lessons, way of dressing and aspirations imposed by her spinster aunt, Miss Rose and the freedom, Chilean cultural background, gardening, cooking, legends, knowledge and carefree moments provided by mama Fresia, the family's cook. Miss Rose was twenty when Eliza came into their lives in 1832 in a soap crate. The other members of the family are Jeremy Sommers, thirty years old, and master of the house and head of the family, director of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd. and John Sommers, ship captain and wandering soul in love with the ocean.

But Allende is constructing a multifarious narrative weaving many parallel stories into one, the life of her characters being influenced and influencing each other's and, at the same time, extending the focus from particular characters to the social, historical, political and economic background, which has a great influence. Thus, there are snippets from the Chilean way of life, festivities, way of thinking and acting, the struggle of various social classes, political differences and their consequences, the struggle between traditional values and modern influences, all making the narrative abundant and captivating.

The strength of this book lies, first of all, in the author's great storytelling technique. The feeling is that the reading is very powerful, very rich in information and can be very easily located temporally and geographically making it an expansive, richly textured and historical adventure.

At the same time, the other great strength of "Daughter of Fortune" lies in the characters penned on the pages of this book. They are colourful, they are credible, and they are full of energy and grounded in the historical adventure becoming real and palpable, identifiable on the streets of some distant countries and eras.

Isabel Allende later takes this story to another level writing a sequence, a narrative that follows the life of some of the characters of the present novel and their subsequent generations - see "Portrait in Sepia".

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