Rating: 
Summary: maravillosa y apasionante
Review: De todas las novelas de esta gran escritora Isabel Allende,esta es la que mas me ha hecho volar mi imaginacion,facil de leer y super entretenida.
Rating: 
Summary: Daughter of Pain
Review: I was more than disappointed in this book. When I got to the end it felt like it had never really started and I wished that I hadn't spent the time reading it. I have heard her other stuff was better... but trust me skip this one.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating!
Review: Finding and reading this book was like one of those fateful accidents that can potentially change your life. I was stuck in Fresno over the weekend and found myself hanging around the Borders bookstore. Allende's book was displayed on an endcap, and I must admit I was at first captivated by the portrait of the young woman on the cover. The fact that it was also heralded as an "Oprah" selection did not impress me. I read the first page of this book and was immediately captivated. As a native of California, Allende's depiction of the Gold Rush era, and the rampant racism inherent to the state's early formation, appeared historically accurate, and was sometimes disturbing. I suppose the life changing part concerns a shift in my perception of how California was settled. My 8th grade California history class never discussed slavery as demonstrated by Allende's reference to the Singsong girls (Chinese prostitutes) who sat chained to their beds chanting "two bittee lookee, four bittee feelee, six bittee doee," and racism portrayed by the seizure of lands held by Californians and Mexicans. Contrary to some of the other reviews here, I believe the character development of Eliza and Tao Chien was superb. I was disappointed, however, that Eliza's culinary skills were never fully developed, as she could have made a fortune in the gold fields running a restaurant. Instead, Eliza tends to squander her gifts in a fruitless search for a less than honorable lover. I read this book in two days, and I am not a fast reader. The story grabs you, and by the end I was sorry to have to leave the world and lives Allende had created. To me, regretting the end of a book is the mark of a good story. The book deals with slavery (Chinese), oppression (Chinese and Latino), greed (everybody), romance, history, and prostitution.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating!
Review: This was definitely one of the best books I have ever read. The characters and the events that unfold around them are described with so much detail, it is easy to imagine that they did in deed live and leave their marks in Valparaiso and San Francisco. I recommend this novel to anyone who is in the mood of reading a true classic. A beautiful, beautiful masterpiece!
Rating: 
Summary: Read Paula - and you have read it all
Review: I have to agree with one of the reviewers in that Isabel Allende does write a lot of the same over and over. I also have to agree with that reviewer in that Paula is her best book. I will not deny that I enjoyed reading Daughter of Fortune, just like I have enjoyed most of her books, but reality is, Paula pretty much summarizes it all. If you have never read Isabel Allende, I won't discourage you from reading this book, but if you have read her work in the past, I'm afraid this will be more of the same.
Rating:
Summary: El viaje por el amor resulta en encontrar la vida
Review: Como todos los libros de Isabel Allende, Hija De La Fortuna tiene muuuchos aspectos e imágenes. Está lleno de amor, de vida, de aventuras y de sorpresas. Además ofrece muchos detalles históricos para poder imaginárse la vida en Latino América y en los Estados Ùnidos casi 200 anos antes. Es otro libro muy rico de la maestra Allende.
Rating:
Summary: INCREDIBLE, SPELLBINdG, CAPTIVATING
Review: I've read a lot of books in my time, and while browsing through my local B.Dalton bookstore, I came upon this masterpiece. This was, by far, one of the most unforgettable books I've ever read. It is told so masterfully, and painstakingly detailed that I couldn't stop reading it! While many say that its too soap-operish for them, I can understand how it may seem that way, but Isabel Allende does not leave any of her characters (major or minor) half-finished. All of her characters are profoundly described and has extraordinary depth. The tale of Eliza Sommers was touching and perhaps one of the best coming of age stories I have ever had the privilege of reading. Also, not only does the book have rich culture and historical significance, it also has touches of deep humor that will make the reader laugh. If you ever buy another book in your life, let it be this one!!!
Rating:
Summary: Passes the Time
Review: First of all, this is not a book I would have chosen. Recently I got a new job teaching English and this turned out to have been the summer reading requirement, so I had to read it in order to teach it.
Maybe I am a literary snob, but when I saw that "Oprah!" sticker, I knew it was not going to become a favorite. I imagined it would be the kind of middlebrow, woman-overcomes-something novel that an unsophisticated reader believes is profound. While I wasn't completely right, I wasn't far wrong.
It's interesting in an historical way, blending disparate elements of Chilean, British, Chinese, and gold rush culture. Certainly the reader will learn a lot of historical factoids. The story, however, is another thing.
For starters, there's too damn much of it. It becomes soap operaish in it's scope - Aunt Rose, the repressed Victorian virgin turns out to be Aunt Rose the wild child chased out of London for disgracing her family with her affair with a married opera singer who, still later, becomes Aunt Rose the soft core pornographer whose brother helps her get her novels published in London in exchange for her "adoption" of his love child with a Chilean girl whose name he can't even remember. Whew. Now do you see what I mean? Had half of it been whacked out by an sharp-pencilled editor as too unbelievable and convoluted the novel might have succeeded better. And that's just the scope problem.
The narration is very heavy-handed. There is almost no dialogue. The (rather intrusive) narrator tells everything, never allowing the characers to show or the reader to infer. It's as though Allende is so afraid that we won't understand that she needs to pound it into us, rather like Theodore Dreiser on one of his worst days.
Additionally, there are serious language errors, things that would not have been said in certain ways in either Victorian Chile or San Francisco. When the protagonist, Eliza, becomes acquainted with some prostitutes, she muses that these must be the kind of women her uncle "partied with"? "Partied with?" 1843 Chile through the mouth of an erstwhile Valley Girl.
It has pretensions to an epic on the "Raintree County" or "Gone With the Wind" scale and, maybe, if Allende was a better writer, it would have worked. Certainly, I would've cared about the characters and enjoyed the book more. It just isn't an epic. It's a quest story and, as every English Lit major knows, all quest stories end up the same way - the heroine finds that what she's been looking for has been with her all the time. (Think "there's no place like home".) You know from the moment Eliza decides to head off to San Francisco with Tao Chien's help (whom she has already announced as her best friend in the first chapter) that she will search for love with Joachin, not find it, and realize that she and Tao Chien were made for each other, both having matured along the journey.
Cue the hanky guy. Tears of joy all around.
I imagine if you like pseudo-intellectual, nicely packed Harlequinesque novels, this would be a good choice, but if you want a meatier read with characters who leap off the page with their vitality, this isn't it.
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