SOURCE: Kephart, Beth. “Performance Artist.” Book (November-December 2001): 60-1.

In the following review, Kephart criticizes the awkward prose and jarring plot of Portrait in Sepia, but argues that the novel is still an entertaining read.

In the opening paragraph of her ninth, exotic book, Isabel Allende issues a warning: “This is a long story,” the narrator cautions, “and it begins before my birth; it requires patience in the telling and even more in the listening.”

No false modesty there. Reading the first several pages of Portrait in Sepia is like watching the ball roll, skitter and drop in a perpetual-motion machine. Courtesans, aristocrats, seafarers, orphans, nephews and grandmothers, not to mention purveyors of erotica, rush tantalizingly by; everything's a scandal. A whorl of place names—San Francisco, Chile, Panama, London, New York. Florence—further threatens all reason and calm. Every tangent leads to at least two more, and it...