SOURCE: "Lovers and Storytellers," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. VIII, No. 9, June, 1991, p. 10.

Ruta is an American fiction writer and critic. In the following review of The Stories of Eva Luna, she describes Allende's stories as "mini-epics, mini-tragedies or even mini-sagas."

In her first novel, The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende threw a veil of sweetness and light over a bitter period in Chilean history: her uncle Salvador Allende's coming to power, the destabilization and 1973 coup and its bloody aftermath. Her fidelity to the magic realist formula that Alejo Carpentier invented and Gabriel Garcia Marquez popularized and then discarded, worked because history provided ample ballast and counterweight to her flights of fancy. There was something a bit precious about the story of grandmother Clara, mother Blanca, daughter Alba, all three names meaning bright, white, light (and Alba had green hair besides!), but it took courage...