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's story is exciting, empowering, and inherently feminist, as she 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 named Molly Walsh is about to take vows as a nun when she is seduced and abandoned, pregnant, by a Chilean aristocrat. Devastated, she accepts a marriage proposal instead from a colleague and friend in San Francisco's Mission District, who will be the devoted stepfather, "Papo," to her child. Molly remains bitter toward the absent father, del Valle, but Emilia lacks for nothing in the loving household where her mother and Papo teach the Mission District's children, provide bread to the poor, and support her unusual goals.
Emilia first makes a living by writing sensational dime novels of "murder, jealousy, cruelty, ambition, hatred... you know, Papo, the same as in the Bible or the opera" (under a pen name, of course). Next she decides to become a journalist, launching a newspaper career, soon traveling to New York (where she takes her first lover and otherwise broadens her worldview) and then abroad: Emilia 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. She is also motivated to fulfill her mother's lifelong wish to track down her biological father, del Valle. Emilia finds great danger as well as the opportunity to define her identity for herself. The adventures she encounters along the way fill Allende's pages with violence, love, high society, and human interest.
As she has in previous acclaimed novels, Allende (The House of the Spirits; A Long Petal of the Sea; The Japanese Lover) 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, with which Emilia will become painfully familiar. 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
Shelf Talker: A daring young woman and groundbreaking reporter journeys from San Francisco to Chile in the 1890s to investigate a civil war and her own roots in this stirring novel by the celebrated Isabel Allende.