SOURCE: A review of The Stories of Eva Luna, in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 6, No. 3, Spring, 1991, p. 60.

In the following review, Bader calls Allende a "master storyteller" but questions her treatment of women and feminist issues in The Stories of Eva Luna.

Like virtually every American, I remember exactly what I was doing when George Bush declared war on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people: I was reading "Our Secret," one of the short stories in Isabel Allende's The Stories of Eva Luna.

Prescient and poignant, this tale is a slice-of-life look at two people who meet on the street, pick each other up for what they assume will be an afternoon's romp between the sheets, and unwittingly discover a shared past of torture and abuse at the hands of an unspecified tyrant. In just five pages, "Our Secret" gives the lie to...