SOURCE: Adil, Alev. “A Tale of the Heart.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5041 (12 November 1999): 25.

In the following review, Adil praises the fresh look at nineteenth-century Chilean and American life in Daughter of Fortune, but finds shortcomings with the novel's clichéd characters.

Isabel Allende's latest novel, Daughter of Fortune, is a lively picaresque romance that spans the decade, 1843-53, and takes us on a circuitous and colourful journey from Valparaiso, a bustling seaport in Chile, to the gold trails of the Sierra Nevada, by way of Canton, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Sacramento. The central story seems to be broadly inspired by the life story of a real woman, Jo Monaghan, who, after bearing an illegitimate child, passed as a man for many years, sharing her secret only with her Chinese lover. (She was also the subject of Maggie Greenwald's film The Ballad of Little Jo, 1993.) Eliza Sommers is...