I loved The House of the Spirits, possibly her most famous book and a seminal work of Latin American magical realism, but it took me almost a month to get through. While I love this kind of story, I’ve noticed that reading her books just seems to take me more time than it does for other authors. The books of hers I’ve read tend to be sweeping, multi-generational sagas spanning decades. I have always liked Isabel Allende, even as I have always struggled somewhat with her books. However, as the Chilean political situation begins to shift, Roser and Victor find their lives upended and their relationship changed forever. Roser and Victor enter into a marriage of convenience to avoid scandal and better be able to raise Roser’s child after Victor’s brother dies in the war, and they plan to get divorced as soon as possible. Victor Damlau, a medic in the Spanish Civil War, and his sister-in-law, Roser, escape Europe on The Winnepeg, a ship commissioned by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda to evacuate Spanish refugees to Chile. Spanning from the 1930s to around 1994, Isabel Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea tells the story of one family’s journey from the Spanish Civil War to their lives in Chile before, during, and after Pinochet’s rule.
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