Rating: 4/5
First Line: Everyone is born with some special talent, and Eliza Sommers discovered early on tha she had two: a good sense of smell and a good memory.
This is the first Isabel Allende novel that I have read. I have heard mixed reviews on her writing and I think it depends on the book you read. I really enjoyed this book. It takes a lot for me to give a book a rating of 5, but this one was pretty good. It followed the life of Eliza Sommers, an orphan to an English family in Chile during the 1800s. She is raised by Rose, a spinster by choice, and her two brothers. She falls in love and gets pregnant by a Chilean man who leaves her to go to America during the Gold Rush of 1849. She follows him to America, almost dying, to find him posing as a young boy. Allende tells Eliza's story, but also describes what America was going through during the Gold Rush. It was a chaotic mess and many people ended up poorer than when they started. She also explores the role of women during that time and how they were treated. Eliza, in some ways benefited by posing as a boy in that she could not be taken advantage of or sold for prostitution, but she had trouble being a male cook. It seems like this was the age where women started to try to be their own person.
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