And Allende's portrait of New Orleans, in particular, is as vivid and beautiful as anything she's written in years. Island Beneath the Sea isn't the best book of her career, but it's a solid story with an appealingly tough heroine. I'm in the latter group: sure, her prose can tend toward the overheated, but there are few more charming storytellers in the world. It would be an overstatement to call Isabel Allende polarizing, but the author of the now-classic The House of the Spirits definitely elicits strong opinions from her detractors and admirers.
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden, it's a sprawling epic of a novel, written in Allende's trademark style, with gorgeous place descriptions, a keen eye for history and a predilection for high drama. Tete finds comfort in voodoo and in the charms of the new city while waiting for the freedom that Valmorain has promised her. After the beginning of the Haitian revolution, Valmorain, his family and Tete move to New Orleans to try to put their lives back together. Toulouse Valmorain, a French plantation owner, purchases Tete, rapes and impregnates her, and forces her to care for his children and deeply troubled wife. The latest novel from Chilean literary legend Isabel Allende follows Tete, a biracial girl born a slave in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) in the late 18th century.
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