PUBLISHERS WEEKLY - March 20, 1995

Allende is a mesmerizing novelist (The House of the Spirits; The Stories of Eva Luna) who here takes on a double challenge. Writing nonfiction for the first time, she interweaves the story of her own life with the slow dying of her 28-year-old daughter, Paula. A magician with words, Allende makes this grim scenario into a wondrous encounter with the innermost sorrows and joys of another human being.

THE MIAMI HERALD - April 16, 1995

A mother's grief: “My soul is choking”
By Margaria Fichtner

Yet despite the overwhelming fatigue and despair that radiate from these pages, the narrative magic that thundered through Allende's first novel, The House of the Spirits, triumphs here, too. This is a book about a daughter's death, but it also is Allende's story - lush with her memories, impressions and passions: vibrant with strange lands, rich lives and grand characters: pulsating with an almost unbearable love of words.

THE SEATTLE TIMES - April 27, 1995

Isabel Allende's latest book is a memoir of the spirit
By Deloris Tarzan Ament

The book is filled with love and magical moments as well as with heartbreak and fear.

THE WASHINGTON POST - April 30, 1995

Letter to a Dying Daughter
By Gabriella De Ferrari

With Paula she does even more. In flawlessly rich prose she shares with us her most intimate feelings as she learns to accept that her daughter will never be rescued and that the only thing that Allende can do is give comfort to an inert and unresponsive human being. Magnificently translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, this is an emotionally charged, spellbinding memoir.

News & Review Sacramento - Spring, 1995

At Rest In The House Of The Spirits
Isabel Allende's Search For Her Daughter
By Rachel Orvino

Paula is full of beautiful imagery and language so delicately crafted that reading the book is like being swept into the tangle of a spider webs: gossamer soft, yet enthralling.

ST. PETERSBURG, FL TIMES - May 14, 1995

MOTHERS on daughters
A mother's love and a classic tale Isabel Allende writes to preserve her daughter's memory much as a photographer takes a snapshot of a family vacation.
By Alan Ryan

Isabel Allende is among the most popular writers of our time, in any language, and she certainly is one of the best. An unabashed storyteller, she won instant acclaim with her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Her others, particularly Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna, further enhanced her reputation. This new book, Paula, while technically nonfiction and stunningly personal, even intimate, glories in all the virtues of her best stories.

Isabel Allende lives in a world that seems pantheistic, so vividly alive are all its things, its places, its people, its spirits. The latter, especially, move easily and comfortable through these pages, just as vividly as mine live with me and yours with you. Getting them convincingly on paper is the hard part, and it is Allende's breathtakingly casual confidence that makes them so real.

In the end, Paula is about infinitely more than its immediate subject, as moving as that is. It is about, as Allende writes near the end, a kind of reality different from the everyday. It is about the “reality the soul knows.”

And what of Paula?

Oh, no. This is a book you'll have to live through yourself.

OREGONIAN, Portland Oregon - May 14, 1995

PAULA: Allende met her father at the morgue.Writing to save a life

But “Paula” is more than autobiography - it is a mother's baring of her soul to the spirit of her beloved daughter while facing her innermost fears. A story of bereavement and the personal struggle against accepting loss as Allende unsparingly recounts her tragic wake at her daughter's side. But it is Allende's acceptance of magic and its coexistence with reality that allows her to tell this story with the full power of her gifted voice. She writes of her personal tragedy while still casting a spell of enchantment. the power of this book is Allende's embrace of live as she learns to accept her daughter's death and is transformed by it.

MIAMI HERALD - May 1995

“Heartwrenching, yet wonderfully life-affirming... vibrant with strange lands, rich lives and grand characters.”

SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER - May 1995

“The true story of Allende's life is even more wonderful, spirited and humorous than its imaginary rendition in her first novel.”

SEATTLE TIMES - May 1995

“A celebration...filled with love and magical moments...”
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER - May 1995

“Has all the lyrical intensity - even, on occasion, the profound joy - that made The House of the Spirits so exciting.”

THE DENVER POST - May 17, 1995

ISABEL ALLENDE'S EXORCISM of DEATH
Writing of daughter's passing proves a salve to Chilean author
By Marian Christy“

Everything about Isabel Allende is vivid. When the world-famous Chilean author looks at you, it's with an X-ray gaze. When she speaks, every word is wrapped in a tangible passion - even though her voice is whisper soft.

This vibrating intensity comes through in her best-selling novels, such as “The House of the Spirits” (which was made into a movie in 1993) and “Of Love and Shadows” (which has been turned into a movie to be released this fall).

It is also evident in her newest book, “Paula,” which is the author's first nonfiction work.

THE NEW YORK TIMES - May 21, 1995

The Long Goodbye
Isabel Allende's memoir combines generations of family history with an account of her daughter's coma
By Suzanne Ruta

When her 27-year-old daughter, Paula, fell ill in December 1991 with a hereditary metabolic disorder known as porphyria and quickly lapsed into a coma, the writer's courage failed her. Then her agent, Carmen Balcells, showed up at the Madrid hospital with a stack of yellow note pads. This memoir is the result, and it is Ms. Allende's best work to date.

A mother trying to entertain a bedridden child, she piles on episode and anecdote in a brilliant flood of autobiographical reminiscence spanning three generations on four continents. A real-time account of Paula's illness - the coma lasted a year - and her family's anguish intervenes with increasing insistency, until the two narrative threads dwindle to one, which snaps with the young woman's death in December 1992. Celebration rather than despair provides the overriding tone. As “Paula” courageously reveals, she has everything it takes: the ear, the eye, the mind, the heart, the all-encompassing humanity.

BUFFALO NEWS - May 28, 1995

“Paula” speaks of mother's love and tenacity of spirit
By Carol McCabe

Isabel Allende, whose novels include “The House of the Spirits” and “Eva Luna,” has written a non-fiction masterpiece. “Paula” is a breathtaking tour de force inspired by a mother's love for her daughter.

This is a sweeping memoir of family history, filled with ghosts, mysterious disappearances and coup de foudre love affairs, and Allende's own extraordinary life in South America, Europe, Lebanon and the United States.

The memoir is addressed to Allende's brilliant, beautiful daughter, Paula, struck down at 30 by a rare metabolic disease.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE - June 18, 1995

Isabel Allende's loving farewell to her daughter
By Penelope Mesic

This heartfelt autobiography is astonishing in its power to speak directly to the reader, perhaps because Allende's voice has a health and generosity that we welcome even when she writes of tragedy.

TIME MAGAZINE - July 10, 1995

Grief and Rebirth
Latin America's foremost woman writer chronicles the death of a daughter - and her own awakening
By Margot Hornblower

Isabel Allende, the distinguished Chilean writer, was celebrating the publication of one of her novels at a Barcelona party in December 1991, when she got word that her daughter was in a hospital in Madrid. She flew to her side. “I love you too, Mama,” the 27-year-old Paula murmured just before she was seized by convulsions and fell into a coma. She never woke up, and a year later she died in Allende's arms. “I had a choice,” the author recalls. “Was I going to commit suicide? Sue the hospital? Or was I going to write a book that would heal me?”

Allende's life story, teeming with picaresque characters and improbable adventures, reads like her novels. In Paula she weaves it, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes abruptly, between graphic passages on her daughter's illness, Allende's own despair, and her metaphysical meditations on the life of the spirit. If the line between fact and fiction seems to blur, Allende explains, “magical realism is not a literary device; it's how I live.”

BOMC - July 1995

An exquisitely rendered, soul bearing memoir by one of the most widely read Latin American Writers.

Paula is a book that carries the reader from tears to laughter, from terror to sensuality to wisdom. It is a hymn from the heart, written by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.