SOURCE: "Coming to America," in Book World—The Washington Post, May 23, 1993, p. 6.

In the following review of The Infinite Plan, Arana-Ward argues that Allende's novel suffers from clichés, "numbing descriptions," and slight characterizations.

A promise is made in Isabel Allende's new novel, [The Infinite Plan] in the lure of its title and the shimmer of its opening tableau. A little boy urinates on a hillside at sunset, his back to the mountains, his eyes on the liquid gold of the Pacific Ocean. In the distance his family waits.

It is a moment he will never forget. At other times in his life, when confronted by the world's surprises, Gregory Reeves felt that wonder, that sensation of belonging to a splendid place where everything is possible and where each thing, from the most sublime to the most horrendous, has a reason for being, where nothing happens by chance...