SOURCE: Donaldson, Peter. Review of Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende. New Statesman 128, no. 4466 (13 December 1999): 57.

In the following review, Donaldson lauds Allende's rich characters and the cultural diversity of the setting in Daughter of Fortune.

Isabel Allende has too often been lazily claimed as a magic realist but, in truth, her work defies classification. Allende herself has said that she merely wants to write “realistic literature”, whatever that means. In fact, the engine of much of her fiction is the notion that people may move through the same physical space yet really inhabit different realities. Her absorbing new novel, Daughter of Fortune, is resolutely realistic, although there are always intimations of the transcendent.

The setting here is the Chilean port of Valparaiso in the 1830s, where the growing British colony has established a nation within a nation, with its clubs, afternoon teas and sedate musical evenings. Into this...