SOURCE: Hopkinson, Amanda. “The Tragic Muse.” New Statesman and Society 8, no. 371 (22 September 1995): 34.

In the following review, Hopkinson praises Allende's achievement in Paula.

To have your child predecease you is to witness an unnatural act. To attempt to make sense of the senseless is but human nature, and persists in the teeth of every defeat. The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende's way of assimilating and conquering her many experiences is to write stories about them. [Paula] is the story of her daughter's collapse with porphyria; her swift descent into coma; her spasmodic rallies under treatment before crossing over into death at the age of 28.

It is also the story of Allende's own life, in one of its permutations. She can provide entertainment with entirely different accounts of one event, as she did when we met. Then, she suggested that she met Willie (her present husband) by jumping in to save...