SOURCE: McMurray, George. Review of Paula, by Isabel Allende. World Literature Today 70, no. 3 (summer 1996): 671.

In the following review, McMurray comments on Allende's literary accomplishment with Paula.

Isabel Allende's most recent book is a memoir dedicated to her daughter Paula, who died in 1992 at the age of twenty-eight. The victim of porphyria, an ailment often resulting in a prolonged state of coma. Paula remained unconscious for a year. The first of the book's two parts begins in December 1991, when Paula falls ill in Madrid and is taken to a local hospital. This part ends in May 1992, when Allende, who has spent six months near her daughter, takes Paula, still comatose, to her home in California, where Paula dies the following December.

Allende is well known as a novelist. Paula being her only nonfiction volume. In many respects, however, this text resembles a novel. Thus, the first-person narrator (Allende) alternates...