Allende, Isabel. Daughter of Fortune. New York: Perennial, 2000.
This took me three days to read thanks to a five hour car ride, an hour boat ride and an evening by the sea. Read the day before, the day of, and the day after Isabel Allende’s birthday.
Daughter of Fortune is the didactic tale of what happens when you become so obsessed with a thought, a feeling that you carry the obsession long after you remember why or what it was all about. This is the complicated saga of Eliza Sommers, raised as an orphan by a Victorian brother and sister – strict and unfeeling Jeremy and his spinster sister Rose. Secrets abound in Daughter of Fortune. When Eliza falls in love with delivery boy Joaquin Andieta her whole life changes. An obsession to be his “slave” claims her and compels her to follow him from Valparasio, Chile to California during the gold rush of 1849.
Best lines to remember: “Many years later, standing before a human head preserved in a jar of gin, Eliza would remember the first meeting with Joaquin Andieta and again experience the same unbearable anguish” (p 80). This line, if you remember it 150 pages later, gives away the entire story. Another line to remember, “The girl felt that she was opening like a carnivorous flower, emitting demonic perfumes to attract her man like a Venus’s-flytrap, crushing him, swallowing him, digesting him, and finally spitting out the splinters of his bones” (p 94) and one more, “‘I told you before that a fixation of the heart is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations but love is the worst'” (p 129). Wise words from the Machi.
Best word in the book: epizootic.
Author Fact: According to Allende’s website she has received 12 honorary doctorates. I enjoyed poking around the family photos the most.
BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Dewey Deconstructed: 600s (food)” (p 73).
~*LunaSea*~ 