My Name is Emilia del Valle has everything I typically look for in fiction, especially women’s fiction and historical fiction: an indomitable female protagonist facing sexism, unjust social mores, and other obstacles in her life. Somehow, this novel fails to deliver on multiple accounts, primarily the entire novel seems recycled from Portrait in Sepia, an earlier Allende novel.
Though written in first person from Emilia’s point-of-view, the novel has a very distant omniscient feel in which Emilia knows all and tells all that others feel and think, though there is no logical reason she has these insights. She tells constantly and rarely shows what’s happening, giving the novel, even the descriptions of the Chilean civil war, the sense of a travelogue. Overall I found it difficult to feel much for Emilia herself or any of the other characters.
Raised in San Francisco by a loving step-father and an ex-nun mother, Emilia begins writing dime novels at an early age. When those no longer satisfy her, she convinces a newspaper to hire her as a reporter; but she must publish under a male nom-de-plum. Eventually she travels to Chile in the company of a fellow reporter, Eric Whelan. She’s to cover the government’s side of the war, and he’s to cover the rebels. She tells his version of the rebels’ events, rather than giving him his own POV. Finally at the end of the novel, for one whole chapter, Eric gets a POV chapter—when he goes to Chile to rescue her from herself-imposed search for her roots in a distant jungle.
Having been disappointed in the last couple of Allende novels, I’m wondering if this will be the last I read.
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My Name is Emilia del Valle (Ballantine Books, May 6, 2025) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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You can read my reviews of other Allende books here:
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