Allende is one of the most popular female writers from Latin America. She is also one of the leading South American feminists. Her female characters rebuke the traditional confines of patrimony and often challenge the roles that are imposed on them by their society. However, in Daughter of Fortune, Sophia A. McClennen states for Review of Contemporary Fiction, Allende has gone one step further: "... the protagonist recognizes that her identity does not depend entirely on the man she loves." McClennen also points out that, by Allende disguising her protagonist as a boy throughout the last half of the novel, she provides many interesting topics of discussion about "gendered identities."

Peter Donaldson, writing for New Statesman, found Daughter of Fortune to possibly be Allende's best novel yet. Although he feels that the second half of Allende's book seems to be diverted from the "driven clarity" of the beginning of the story, he still enjoyed the broadened scope of her work as she leaves Chile behind and attempts to illustrate the turbulent times associated with California and the gold rush.

Daughter of Fortune is more like a "television miniseries than a motion picture," proclaimed Ruth Lopez for the New York Times Book Review. The novel "tells a pleasurable story," writes Lopez, but there is "nothing profound in the novel's prose." Nonetheless, Lopez finds that Allende "smoothly navigates" the reader through the story. R. Z. Sheppard, in a review for Time, also praises Allende's storytelling skills, referring to Daughter of Fortune as a "riproaring girl's adventure story." Sheppard finds that Allende exemplified a new approach of feminist writers who have been "plugging late 20th century cultural attitudes into a spacious 19th century literary vehicle." Allende's writing, according to Sheppard, demonstrates a confident woman's point of view.

On the other hand, Michiko Kakutani, writing for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, does not appreciate Allende's "feminist lamentations" on the state of nineteenth-century women. Kakutani finds Allende's characters to be "simplistic and trite" and refers to the book as a "bodice-ripper romance." She much prefers Allende's first novel, The House of Spirits over Daughter of Fortune.

Writing for the Guardian, Alex Clark also expresses disappointment with Daughter of Fortune, again preferring Allende's earlier works. The scope of the novel is too broad, Clark believes, and this gives Allende too little time to deepen her characters' development. However, there are moments in the narrative, especially those that concern "the enigmatic Rose," Clark writes, in which Allende demonstrates her storytelling skills and "her ear for the intriguing and bizarre."