SOURCE: Novella, Cecilia. Review of Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende. Américas (English edition) 51, no. 5 (September 1999): 61.

In the following review, Novella evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Daughter of Fortune.

Chilean author Isabel Allende, having followed the culinary example of her Mexican colleague Laura Esquivel in last year's Afrodita [Aphrodite], presents us this year with Hija de la fortuna [Daughter of Fortune], a novel in which she leaves the kitchen behind and returns to traditional narration.

Over the four hundred pages of her new novel, set in the nineteenth century, Allende takes us from Valparaiso, Chile, to somewhere in California, covering the gold rush and its aftermath. She also includes a look back at events in Europe in the early 1800s, as part of the personal history of Rose Somers, one of her characters.

The story, which begins in the port of Valparaiso, is simple enough. A...