You searched for book_author:"Isabel Allende"
Oh look, an Isabel Allende novel hanging out on the New Books shelf. You treat me so well, library. So, so well. And I tried to love it, but I really only ended up liking it, and even then that might be a stretch. The Japanese Lover is the kind of novel that someone else will definitely love, but that person isn’t me.
This is a parallel story of two women—Irini Bazili and Alma Belasco—and…
Multigenerational family epics are difficult. One of the most powerful things a writer can do is create a protagonist the reader can invest in. Multigenerational stories spurn this wisdom for a different kind of magic, one that relies on the reader to follow the threads that connect the family members over years, decades, sometimes even centuries. If not done properly, the result can be messy or just uninteresting. Every once in a while, however, I…