Esteban, who initially supported the conservative government, becomes disillusioned with its corruption and brutality. I was rivetted throughout the book, with the vivid images , so descriptively and cleverly written by the author. She reveals that Clara represents her own grandmother: she also had the gift of being clairvoyant and communicating with all the spirits that entered her home by way of a three-legged table and tarot cards.

Having served the Del Valle and Trueba families all her life, Nana is emotionally close to all the children that she has taken care of, especially Clara.He also turns to Tránsito, who as an influential Madam has connections to high-level military figures, to help free Blanca. Meanwhile, Jaime and Nicholas both fall in love with a young drug addict named Amanda; Amanda initially loves Nicholas and becomes pregnant with his child. When she is older, Alba attends a local college where she meets Miguel, now a grown man, and becomes his lover. After her death, Esteban decides to fulfill her dying wish for him to marry and have legitimate children. Controversy occurred over the casting of predominantly white English-speaking actors in a Latin American period film.

The same holds true for the events leading up to and after the military coup and the Pinochet situation. Two oft-cited reasons were its diffusely episodic structure and its cast of mostly Anglo-American actors in Latin American roles. However, the intentional subversion and obscurity of historical events, reminiscent of many other magical realism novels, creates a certain discomfort and distrust that has likely set the stage for several challenges and contentions in schools.

Multigenerational stories spurn this wisdom for a different kind of magic, one that relies on the reader to follow the threads that connect the family members over years, decades, sometimes even centuries.

The book is a journal by Alba Trueba recollecting the lives of her parents and grandparents, as well as the beginning of her own life.

In college, I was fortunate that La Casa de los Espiritus was required reading for one of my classes, so I read the prose a second time in Spanish.

As long as she maintains her high level of Latina magical realism, I have no difficulties rating all of her books at least 4. Blanca, the eldest, inherits her mother's mystical abilities and falls in love with Pedro, a revolutionary. Describes a book or dust jacket that does show some signs of wear on either the binding, dust jacket or pages.Esteban helps Blanca and Pedro Tercero flee to Canada, where the couple finally find their happiness. Isabel Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants including Esteban, the patriarch, a volatile and proud man whose lust for land is legendary and who is haunted by tyrannical passion for the wife he can never completely posses; Clara, the matriarch, elusive and mysterious, who foretells family tragedy and shapes the fortunes of the house and the Truebas; Blanca, their daughter, soft-spoken yet rebellious, whose shocking love for the son of her father’s foreman fuels Esteban’s everlasting contempt, even as it produces the grandchild he adores; and Alba, the fruit of Blanca’s forbidden love, a luminous beauty and a fiery and willful woman. Which is really quite cool, because I don’t read enough fiction set in South America, by South American authors. Rosa's fiancé, a poor miner named Esteban Trueba, is devastated and attempts to mend his broken heart by devoting his life to restoring his family hacienda, Las Tres Marías, which has fallen into poverty and disrepair.