I liked Daughter of Fortune, but didn't love it, which was a disappointment. I had read Allende's wonderful, amazing House of the Spirits some years ago, and I keep reading her other books in the hope of recapturing the magic of that one novel. But this one was not to be it (and I think I'm giving up now). The story is about an orphaned girl named Eliza, who gets taken into a wealthy home in Chile in the 1870's (or so). One day, she falls in love with a poor but intelligent boy, who soon leaves her to search for gold in California; when she discovers she's pregnant (gasp!), she decides to follow him, and the rest of the book is about her adventures in America, where she spends most of the time pretending to be a boy while searching for her love. I did like the novel while in the middle of it, but I ended up putting it down for about a week when I went away, and found I had forgotten most of the story, and why I cared. Also, my biggest pet peeve in books and films, Allende just ends the book without giving a definite conclusion. Didn't she get paid an absurd amount of money to both write and finish this book? I hate when it's up to the reader to decide what really happened - that's the author's job!
Next up...Wuthering Heights.
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