SOURCE: "Tales from Isabel Allende's Passionate, Magical World," in Quill and Quire, Vol. 56, No. 11, November, 1990, p. 25.

Urquhart is a Canadian poet, novelist, and short story writer whose works include Changing Heaven (1990). In the following mixed review of The Stories of Eva Luna, she states that "what one takes away from this collection is a sense of the richness of life with all its attendant mysteries, celebrations, and miseries."

This collection of fabular fictions [The Stories of Eva Luna], which is a kind of surrealistic spin-off from Isabel Allende's last novel, Eva Luna, opens with the photographer/journalist Rolf Carlé making a request. He wants Eva, who has become his lover at the end of the previous book, to tell a story just for him.

What follows is a series of 23 tall tales, which may or may not refer to characters encountered in the novel, and which take the...