SOURCE: Ruta, Suzanne. “Lovers and Storytellers.” Women's Review of Books 8, no. 9 (June 1991): 10.

In the following negative review of The Stories of Eva Luna, Ruta contends that many of the stories in the volume are sentimental, contrived, and lacking in substance.

In her first novel, The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende threw a veil of sweetness and light over a bitter period in Chilean history: her uncle Salvador Allende's coming to power, the destabilization and 1973 coup and its bloody aftermath. Her fidelity to the magic realist formula that Alejo Carpentier invented and Gabriel García Márquez popularized and then discarded, worked because history provided ample ballast and counterweight to her flights of fancy. There was something a bit precious about the story of grandmother Clara, mother Blanca, daughter Alba, all three names meaning bright, white, light (and Alba had green hair besides!), but it took courage to...