CHICAGO SUN TIMES - October 3, 1999

Allende joins the Gold Rush
by Sharon Barrett

Since her debut novel, The House of the Spirits, in 1985, Isabel Allende's work has received steadfast acceptance from legions of readers. And no wonder. Like the superstitious peasant women with their potions and magic who appear so frequently in her writing, the Chilean novelist can be spellbinding.

Daughter of Fortune, her ninth book, is the tale of a young Chilean woman's search not for wealth but for love during California's Gold Rush days. Like other stories set in a time and place peopled by the likes of Mark Twain, the adventures of Eliza Sommers sometimes veer toward the tall tale.

But it is part of Allende's talent to make us believe that even the most outlandish coincidences and crossing of paths might really be possible. And her readers likely have grown comfortable with the presence of ethereal beings. In this book, however, owing to Eliza's deep friendship with a man named Tao Chi'en, the ghosts tend to be Chinese rather than Latin.

The story is told by a narrator who knows how things are going to turn out and tantalizingly hints at events to come. It opens with a look at the start of Eliza's life, which basically she reckons from having been left as an infant in a soap crate on the doorstep of an English brother and sister.

But this daughter of fortune is not destined to live out her life in Chile. Following the pattern of women in her family who “were always deranged by their first love,” Eliza, at 16, is pregnant by a secret lover who has gone to California to strike it rich. Fearful of the fate that awaits her if she reveals her conditions to Rose and Jeremy, she stows away on a ship for San Francisco, vowing to find her beloved.

Eliza's exploits in California parallel the evolution of rough-and-tumble mining campa into somewhat more civilized communities that count among their inhabitants preachers, teachers and entrepreneurs. Along the way, Daughter of Fortune, true to its billing as a historical novel provides readers not only with romance but also a good many facts about a place where “gold had attracted a quarter of a million immigrants in four years' time.”

Allende's experience as a journalist also may account for her straightforward narrative style, always telling the reader what happened, rarely dramatizing or having the characters act out their roles. But there's more than enough action — even if it's told rather than shown — to keep readers turning the pages.

There are plenty of surprises. In addition to the question of what has become of Eliza's lover, there's the puzzle of Eliza's parentage and the mystery of Rose's shadowy past and her source of money.

Some credit should go to translator Margaret Sayers Peden. As with her translation of other Allende works from Spanish, the one is a generally smooth rendering into English.

But the major kudos goes to Allende herself. Since her marriage to an American, she now lives in California's Marin County, once a site of the horrors and hurrahs of gold fever she so vividly depicts in this book. After finishing “Daughter of Fortune,” readers might like to imagine that amid the present day riches of that prosperous chunk of land move the ghosts of an Eliza Sommers and her true love — ghosts Allende saw and spoke to. And from those evocations, this charming writer again makes us believe in spirits.

LOS ANGELES TIMES - October 10, 1999

The Sixth Sense: Isabel Allende on California's
Mythic Past
By Katy Buttler

Set in the before, during and after of the Gold Rush, “Daughter of Fortune,” Isabel Allende's first novel in six years, tries to stake a claim in this misty landscape, where the ghost of Murieta can still be heard riding. It is an extravagant tale by a gifted storyteller whose spell brings to life the 19th century world, from the docks of Valparaiso, Chile, to the gaming tables of Hong Kong, from the places of California's Central Valley to the fire-scarred streets of San Francisco.

THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE
October 10, 1999

An intricate novel by a fine storyteller. Rebellion, Isabel Allende knows all too well, Is the favorite literary form of human behavior
By Han Stavans

After five novels, a memoir, a collection of stories, and a recipe book, Allende is comfortably established as a literary star. That she is not taken too seriously by high-brow critics is not surprising. The intellectual establishment is suspicious of success (as if esthetics and commerce were mortal enemies), and Allende is among the very few from south of the Rio Grande to capitalize on the rich oral tradition and the baroque exuberance of her native region to manufacture emotional tales that sell millions of copies in many languages.

Allende is a unique and staggering storyteller with an enviable talent for intricate narratives involving casts of dozens. Once the reader submits to her wizardry, a florid, detailed universe of hopes and lust, of class struggle and quarreling individual identities, unfolds. It is a universe where emotions, not ideas, reign, and Allende makes it come alive by placing rebellion at the center of it. Rebellion, she known all too well, is the favorite literary form of human behavior.

Allende is at her best in the study of colonialists and emigres in Chile in the 19th century. Her descriptions of routine port and urban life — immigration, school, religion, government — are stunning, as are her sketches of the intellectual climate. Also engrossing is the way the novel balances a multiethnic cast. The Cantonese herbalist of Tao Chi'en, who becomes Eliza's main companion in her odyssey in search of Andieta in California, is compelling and even enlightening.

Perhaps most intriguing, though, is the ghost-like presence of the 19th-century border bandit Joaquín Murrieta, a sort of Robin Hood whose legend today resonates in Chile, Mexico, and among Chicanos in the Southwest. Pablo Neruda wrote a play about him, Octavio Paz's grandfather published one of the several biographies available, and the number of poems, corridos, and stories in which he appears is almost infinite. So as not to spoil the thrill, I won't reveal the connection between Eliza Sommers and the bandit. Suffice to say that it is through him that “Daughter of Fortune” moves from the ordinary to the mythical.

ATLANTA - JOURNAL CONSTITUTION
October 10, 1999

Allende's 'Daughter of Fortune' Embarks
on journey of discovery
By Greg Changnon

Allende has always been a breathless, confident storyteller; her narratives are dependably clean and quick. They're melodramatic, of course, but in this book, the melodrama deepens into a convincing journey of self-discovery. It's not only the ingenue who discovers herself a heroine, but the writer who discovers a deeper, more powerful sort of magic.

Allende is at her bet when describing the madness of Gold rush California, with its roving bands or thieves, its jaded prostitutes and its scheming, ragtag miners. And if the last section of the novel bogs down in social commentary, the writer revives her story in a finale that is both romantic and powerful.

The possibility of a utopian society is the obsession of a minor character in “Daughter of Fortune,” and it is Northern California in the 1850s that becomes Allende's utopia. “In California,” she writes, “neither past nor scruples counted; eccentricity was welcomed and guilt did not exist as long as the offense remained hidden.” In this multicultural world, magic and passion aren't hidden and left to die but worn on the sleeve, embraced, even honored. It is only when Eliza, disguised as Tao Chi'en's male assistant for much of the novel, rediscovers the treasures of her true self that she moves from innocence to independence. For Allende, magical realism is no longer a literary technique, but a way of life.

THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
October 10, 1999

GOLD FEVER: 'Fortune' is an unfortunate outing for the usually reliable Isabel Allende
By Lonnie Hewitt

As in her other novels, Allende interweaves a densely-layered tale of passion with the stuff of history and legend. The characters are many and varied.

The historical tidbits are often fascinating, and the view of California is clearly the author's own.

For the most part the descriptions of violence, racism and the Chinese slave trade remain chunks of facts on the page.

DENVEN PORST - October 10, 1999

Allende pens suspenseful masterpiece
"DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE"
By Diane Carman

“Daughter of Fortune.” Her characters are richly drawn and the setting is so carefully depicted, it's as if you are transported to another place and time. Still, this is not just another predictable period piece. Allende is a skilled social critic with a rapier wit, so things are not all as genteel they seem, thank goodness.

In "Daughter of Fortune," Allende has created a masterpiece of historical fiction that is passionate, adventurous and brilliantly insightful. And right up to the end, it's suspenseful and surprising.

METRO MIAMI - October 22, 1999

“DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE”: Author gets
personal with fans
By Anabelle de Gale

Daughter of Fortune breaks six years of silence for Allende, the author of seven other books.

One of the most widely read Latin-American female writers in history, Allende weaves autobiographical details into her stories. Those details draw in fans.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
October 24, 1999

Left on a Genteel Doorstep: Isabel Allende's novel follows its foundling heroine From an English colony in Chile to the California gold rush
By Ruth Lopez

In “Daughter of Fortune,” a novel more akin to a television mini-series than a motion picture, Allende has continued her obsession with passion and violence. There is nothing profound in the novel's prose, which simply tells a pleasurable story. Somehow, even as “Daughter of Fortune” billows up, seemingly veering out of control, Allende smoothly navigates us through this harmless, happy monster of a book. To the very end, there are plenty of renegade current threatening to pull the story in other directions.

That's called an abundance of material, and in Allende's case there's surely much more waiting in the wings, ready to be moved onstage in her next book.

SAN FRANCISCO MAGAZINE - October 1999

“DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE” The Novel

No one could accuse Isabel Allende of being short on plot in Daughter of Fortune (HarperCollins), one of the few novels outside the detective and mystery genres where a female protagonist leaps to action more readily than she looks inward. Part exuberant girls' adventure story, part historical romance, it's the tale of a Chilean orphan who falls for an unsuitable lover as a teenager, stows away on a brigantine with the help of a Chinese cook, and pursues her quarry to California during the gold rush. Told with San Rafael-based Allende's light, deft touch, the story has enough plot twists and intriguing historical detail to keep the pages turning.

SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS - November 7, 1999

Allende returns with a rich story about following
love, prosperity during the Gold Rush
DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE
By Karen Cushman

Early in Isabel Allende's “Daughter of Fortune,” the heroine says her memory is “like the hold of the ship... vast and somber, bursting with boxes, barrels, and sacks...” So too is this novel of Gold Rush California vast and sober, bursting with events, history, wondrous characters, humor and truth.

The Gold Rush has always been as much myth as history. In this wide-ranging, spirited novel, Allende explodes many of the myths; Not everyone comes looking for gold; there are women in California who are not prostitutes; few who come strike it rich in quite the way they had planned.

Allende's writing, like Eliza's love full of delirium and torment, is almost neo-Victorian at times, and the book is long. “Daughter of Fortune,” unlike her other novels, is not magical realism, but it is wonderfully improbable and so superbly told that it becomes a marvel of storytelling. In any genre, any form, any language. Isabel Allende is a California treasure more precious and long lasting than gold.

MORE ALLENDE MAGIC
“Daughter of Fortune” tells a blockbuster
love story
By Anna Mundow

Isabel Allende is best known for sweeping novels that blend historical fact and family drama with uplifting fantasy. Fifteen years ago. “The House of the Spirits” established the Chilean-born writer as an accomplished practitioner of magic realism, and even her most anguished work — “Paula,” a memoir inspired by the death of her 28-year-old daughter in 1992 — was leavened by spiritual reflections.

In Allende's latest novel, however, the balance may have shifted.“Daughter of Fortune,” a sumptuous 19th-century epic set mainly in Chile and California, is decidedly earthbound. It is also, of course, decidedly Allende: dreams, spirits, herbal potions and native wisdom assist the young heroine on her romantic quest. But the mystical and the impossible take a backseat to the historical and the merely improbable, allowing Allende the storyteller to shine. And that she does in this tantalizing story of love and memory that gracefully weaves the past into the present as it exposes the sublime foolishness of the human heart.

HARPERCOLLINS - October 1999

“DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE” A dazzling new historical novel from “one of the most important novelists to emerge from Latin America in the past decade.”
— Boston Globe

Miami Herald

A classic story from one of the foremost and beloved storytellers of our time, Daughter of Fortune proves again Allende's ability to “hold the world spellbound with her tales”

NEW YORK TIMES - November 7, 1999

Daughter of Fortune A “sprawling, engrossing novel”
“A masterpiece of historical fiction.”
The long-awaited novel from the best selling author of Aphrodite and The House of the Spirits — Isabel Allende
A “rich cast of characters... a pleasurable story.”

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY - November 1999

“This is storytelling at its most seductive,
a brash historical adventure.”

DENVER POST - November 1999

“Passionate, adventurous, and brilliantly insightful. And right up to the end, it's suspenseful and surprising.”

LOS ANGELES TIMES - November 1999

“An extravagant tale by a gifted storyteller whose spell brings to life the 19th century world... Entertaining and
well paced... compelling.”

THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE
November 1999

“Allende is a unique and staggering storyteller with an enviable talent for intricate narratives... Once the reader submits to her wizardry, a florid, detailed universe of hopes and lust, of class struggle and quarreling individual identities, unfolds.”

USA TODAY - November 10, 1999

True daughter of fortune Isabel Allende has known exile and The thrill of an invented life
By Deirdre Donahue

Daughter of Fortune begins in Chile in 1832 and ends during the California gold rush. “It's a story of people who came looking for gold and found freedom.”

TIME - November 15, 1999

Footnote No Longer: As women's history takes
root in the canon, More stories about the past
take on a female voice
By R.Z. Sheppard

Isabel Allende's Eliza Sommers runs circles around everyone else in Daughter of Fortune. Allende, raised in Chile and currently residing in California, is probably the most widely read Latin American woman novelist ever published. She transfers a variation of this distinction to Eliza, who breaks every rule of 19th century Valparaiso society to seek her callow lover in gold crazed California.

This novel has pretensions, but they are overridden by Allende's riproaring girl's adventure story. In fact, the book exemplifies the new feminist approach by plugging late 20th century cultural attitudes into a spacious 19th century literary vehicle. Like Una Spencer, Eliza Sommers makes her way in the world by cross-dressing. She befriends a Chinese healer who becomes her confidant, her partner in an alternative medicine practice and eventually her soul make for life. Throughout it all, Allende projects a woman's point of view with confidence, control and an expansive definition of romance as a fact of life. In this book and Sobel's, history is not only revised but also enthusiastically refurnished.

THE LONDON TIMES - November 25, 1999

Allende swashbuckles DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE

The transforming power of love, and its ability to withstand the vicissitudes of war, political repression — even death itself — is a recurring theme in Isabel Allende's work, and is treated in a variety of ways, ranging from the fantastical (The House of the Spirits; Eva Luna) to the elegiac (Of Love and Shadows; Paula). Daughter of Fortune (translated by Margaret Sayer Peden) is also about love, but its form is that of an adventure story. There are a few nods to magic realism, but overall this is a pretty straightforward — one might even say swashbuckling — read.

The story begins, as befits its genre, with the discovery of a foundling, abandoned on the porch of the Valparaiso residence of Jeremy Sommers, an English clergyman. This child — a baby girl — is named Eliza and is brought up by Sommers and his sister, Rose, to be a model of virtuous womanhood. The failure of this endeavor is seen when Eliza, at 18, fall in love with Joaquin Andieta, a handsome but impoverished young Chilean, and becomes pregnant as a result. Undaunted by this catastrophe, she resolves to follow her lover to the ends of the earth -almost literally, as it happens, because Joaquin, caught up in the “gold fever” of 1849, has absconded to California.

It is then that the novel, which has been largely taken up with a lovingly detailed description of mid-19th century life in a small South American city, embarks for still more exotic realms. Hong Kong in the aftermath of the Opium Wars is the next port of call, following the reader's introduction to Tao Chi'en, the doctor turned ship's cook whom Eliza bribes to help her in her quest. A lengthy digression or Chinese medical practices is followed by a rather grisly account of a long sea voyage, when Eliza, alded and abetted by Tao Chi'en, stows away on board a ship bound for San Francisco.

From San Francisco, which Allende depicts as midway between shantytown and metropolis, the ill-assorted couple set out for the gold fields of Sacramento, where Tao Chi'en swiftly establishes himself as physician to the local Chinese community and Eliza concealing her true identity by dressing as a man — plants the next stage of her campaign to track down her errant lover. This (it hardly needs saying) is by no means uncomplicated, involving further cross-dressing shenanigans when Eliza joins a touring company of actors, and (though still ostensibly male) is required to play a female role. Nor is this the last of her transformations before she comes face to face with her heart's desire.

As the — necessarily partial — summary above indicates, Allende's novel belongs to the picaresque tradition beloved of Spanish writers from Cervantes onwards, and, though full of realistic detail, is far from being a realistic novel. Like Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, to which it bears some resemblance, it is packed with incident, rushing from one highly coloured scene to the next, sweeping aside one's objections to its improbabilities and over-simplifications with sheer bravura energy.

If you like your passions grand and your views panoramic, then Daughter of Fortune will be irresistible. Even if your tastes (like this reviewer's) incline towards more understated kinds of fiction, you'll find it hard not to be beguiled by the charm and ingenuity of Allende's storytelling.

Book - November/December 1999

“DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE” By Isabel Allende
“I went to the letters that the wives of pioneers wrote, the letters that uneducated miners wrote to their families, the recipes that they would share. That's what interest me — the daily lives, not the vision of the victors who wipes out the people of color and got the gold.”

Allende's latest, Daughter of Fortune, is a novel that mirrors its author's tendency to follow unexpected paths. Set in the mid-1900s during the height of the Gold Rush, it concerns an impetuous young woman named Eliza Sommers who leaves Chile in order to pursue the passionate, mercurial Jaoqu’ín Andieta, who has gone to California to seek his fortune. Eliza instead finds herself in an entirely different relationship with Tao Chi'en, a Chinese doctor. At the end, Joaquín, the object of her quest, becomes not to much elusive as irrelevant. What begins almost as romance fiction, full of breathless embraces and stolen kisses, rapidly becomes a novel about Eliza's search for self-knowledge.

“Why did I choose that subject? Why that heroine in pursuit of love and freedom?” Allende asks. “Every book is related to some kind of quest. While I am writing, the quest is not clear, but sooner or later it becomes obvious. Maybe Eliza Sommers is me. Maybe I was her in another life.”

THE WATERSTONE'S MAGAZINE
Holiday 1999 Issue

“DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE” By Isabel Allende
By Sara Hinckley

Daughter of Fortune is a story to be savored. A novel of love and freedom, its powerful impact is due in large part to its details, from historical minutiae to lyrical phrases. Young Eliza Sommers abandons her wealthy and strict Victorian upbringing in Chile to follow her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Willing to face nearly impossible challenges, Eliza finds the object of her passion ever more elusive. However, the journey quickly becomes an end in itself. Each experience strengthens her until Eliza finally realizes that she has won a greater prize than she dreamed: her independence.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE - January 9, 2000

A tale of love, loss and memory
Recalls 19th Century romance stories
By Manuel Luis Martinez

Isabel Allende's first novel in six years, “Daughter of Fortune,” announces itself as a historical romance, but it can perhaps more accurately be understood as a sort of postmodern Victorian novel. A sometimes beautifully written, always compelling and provocative tale, it is most fruitfully apprehended in its revisionary, and often nostalgic, gestures toward its literary antecedents. Reading this novel brings to mind 19th Century masterpieces such as Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," Charles Dickens' “Great Expectations” or even American writer E.D.E.N. Southworth's “The Hidden Hand.” Like these past romances, Allende's novel has multiple central characters, large time frames and compelling plot lines that crisscross and come together in unexpected ways. But what Allende has achieved is more than just another compelling foray into the genre of the historical romance that has lately come into vogue.

Allende, an immigrant to the U.S., had to leave Chile in the wake of the 1973 coup that toppled her uncle, Salvador, from power as president. She writes profoundly of the difficulty in understanding the present through a fading, sometimes distorted memory. “Daughter of Fortune” is in many ways indicative of her own need to recall her past. She, like her heroes, works hard to make the silent past communicative. Allende suggests that one must work hard at finding the meaning of one's present by sifting through personal and social histories; the extraction of pure meaning will perhaps yield an understanding of our current selves.

HARPERCOLLINS - April 2000

“DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE”
By Isabel Allende

Full of passion, danger, and the kind of color only Allende can give a tale, Eliza's story is grand romance and high adventure.