SOURCE: Mujica, Barbara. Review of Portrait in Sepia, by Isabel Allende. Américas (English edition) 53, no. 5 (October 2001): 63.

In the following review, Mujica appreciates Allende's multicultural diversity and feminist perspective in Portrait in Sepia.

Isabel Allende's latest novel continues the saga of the Sommers and Rodríguez-Del Valle families, begun in Hija de la fortuna [Daughter of Fortune]. Eliza Sommers, the adventurous protagonist of the first book, is the illegitimate daughter of John Sommers, an English sea captain whose brother and sister settle in Santiago. Raised to be a proper young lady by her aunt (who writes naughty novels on the side), Eliza follows her lover Joaquín to California during the gold rush, but winds up marrying Tao Chi'en, a zhong-yi, or Chinese doctor.

The couple's daughter, Lynn, reputedly one of the most beautiful girls in San Francisco, is seduced early in Retrato en sepia [Portrait in Sepia...