Isabel Allende brings the experience of more than 20 books to My Name Is Emilia del Valle, a swashbuckling tale of the life and adventures of a young woman born in San Francisco in the 1860s. Emilia travels from California to her father's native Chile during that country's civil war, bucking social norms and going wherever she's told she can't.
A young Irish novice nun named Molly Walsh is seduced and abandoned, pregnant, by a Chilean aristocrat. Devastated, she accepts a marriage proposal from a colleague and friend in San Francisco's Mission District, who will be the devoted stepfather, "Papo," to her child. Emilia lacks for nothing in the loving household.
Emilia first makes a living by writing sensational dime novels (under a pen name, of course). Next, she decides to become a journalist, launching a newspaper career, traveling to New York and then abroad; she journeys to Chile to cover the civil war as a reporter for San Francisco's Daily Examiner. Female reporters are vanishingly rare, but as war correspondents, unprecedented; and Emilia del Valle writes under her own name.
As she has in previous acclaimed novels, Allende (The House of the Spirits; A Long Petal of the Sea) applies riveting storytelling to an exploration of history through the lens of a fictional heroine. Allende's language, and Frances Riddle's translation, is evocative in its descriptions of Chile's lovely landscapes, a young woman's complicated love for her family, and the horrors of the battlefield. This enthralling novel leaves Emilia, still young, in a position of some uncertainty: readers may hope for more from this plucky protagonist in a possible sequel. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia