Another beautiful novel from Isabel Allende! I truly enjoyed this story about a fictional woman dropped into real historical events, including the Chilean Civil War of 1891. Emilia Del Valle, a female journalist, decides to travel from San Francisco to Chile to cover the war.
This story also includes reference to the women who followed their husbands and sons into war, known as “cantineras” or canteen women. Written with a journalist’s voice, in the first person past tense, the story has several threads as Emilia also seeks to reunite with her long lost father in Chile. All of the characters are fully developed, including Emilia’s mother, and the story moves quickly through the violence of war and political upheaval.
A few sections seem overly focused on summary, rather than action, but I do enjoy historical fiction, so I was able to keep turning the pages. The story is interspersed with the imagined news articles written by Emilia, which imbues the novel with the flavor of true journalism .
Read more at Book Passage: My Name Is Emilia Del Valle
Diana Adair 
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