SOURCE: Stavans, Ilan. “Do You Remember?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5140 (5 October 2001): 26.

In the following review, Stavans faults Portrait in Sepia for relying too heavily on the plots of Allende's previous novels, noting that the novel caters to the entertainment market rather than advancing the literary arts.

Isabel Allende is a global phenomenon. It took less than a second for the search engine Google to come up with 49,700 results after I typed her name. Among these results is her website, www.isabelallende.com, available in English and Spanish, which informs us about her novels, memoirs and collections of stories translated into some twenty-five languages, from Albanian to Icelandic. There are photographs too, one featuring Allende's uncle, Chile's President Salvador Allende, next to her mother, and scores of others in which she poses with celebrities such as Antonio Banderas and Jeremy Irons.

Allende, although Peruvian by birth, was raised in...