This book has it all! Passionate love affairs, AIDS, abortion, child pornography, concentration camps, aging, homosexuality, interracial relationships, euthanasia, Down Syndrome, internment camps, and dead family members showing up years later! And everyone has a secret. Members of my book club imagined that the author had a checklist of all of these topics and simply checked them off as she assigned characters to each one.
So does the book work with all of this stuff going on? Yeah, kind of. The author utilizes an interesting writing technique in regards to time. Unlike some writers who jump back and forth in time, Allende is all over the place moving from time to time, backward and forward, and sometimes making the reader's head spin. She also refers to something that happened to a character in the past but she doesn't explain that fact until later in the book. She also does a lot of branching. She will start a chapter with the idea that she is going to tell a certain part of the story, but then somehow she dives into a totally unrelated tale that has nothing to do with the first story.
Yes somehow it all kept me reading. I liked it. Didn't love it, but certainly thought it was a decent read. - June
