SOURCE: Schwirtz, Mira. “Paula Remembered.” San Francisco Review of Books 20, no. 2 (May-June 1995): 10.

In the following review, Schwirtz observes several of Allende's familiar recurring themes in Paula.

In Chilean author Isabel Allende's life, two tragic twists of fate marked sharply divergent trajectories along which her life unfolded. Their imprint indelibly stamps all of her writing. One was the 1973 Chilean military coup that established Auguste Pinochet's totalitarian government and led to the Allende family's exile to Venezuela. The other was her daughter Paula's grave illness in 1991 that placed the young woman in a coma from which she never recovered.

The violent end of her uncle Salvador Allende's socialist administration and the subsequent years of torture, imprisonment, and death of many innocent Chilean citizens is chronicled in many of Allende's books. It also plays a major role in this new book of nonfiction [Paula], but here it figures as a disturbing...