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Daughter of Fortune

Written by Isabel Allende

399 pages

Published by HarperCollins

Review by William Dressler

Receives: 5 Quills

The Copperfield ReviewWe natives of California have always heard about the gold rush back in 1849, and most of us have probably wondered at one time or another what it would have been like then, running off for San Francisco with our gold pans and dreams of fortunes made. Few of us would think of the difficulties of making what seemed to be an easy fortune, or the difficulties of following our hearts to the ends of the earth, but it is just those difficulties that Isabel Allende, a master storyteller, forces us to face with transcendental dignity, poetry and humor in Daughter of Fortune.

Written in a similar lyrical, dreamlike style as Gabriel Garcia Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude, Daughter of Fortune is the story of Eliza Sommers, a Chilean girl orphaned at birth and raised by an English brother and sister in the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile. Eliza falls in love, but suddenly the man who consumes her thoughts and passions is struck with gold rush fever and disappears to California. Eliza flees after him and finds herself caught up in the chaos of lawlessness and greed that was so prevalent in Sacramento then. When she finds love again, it is in the most unlikely of circumstances.

This story is an honest, compelling and always entertaining look at how low greed can bring human beings to grovel, and at how the human heart can soar despite any restrictions pressed upon it. Allende, who is also the author of The House of the Spirits and Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, shows us through the character of Eliza that we can create the lives we want to live if we are brave enough to follow our sense of adventure and not settle for the tried and the true.

William Dressler is a writer/reviewer with a B.A. degree from Northwestern University. He has a lifelong interest in Italian history, particularly the Renaissance, and he is currently in the final stages of writing his novel based on the life of the Medici family.