[In the following review, Mujica appreciates Allende's multicultural diversity and feminist perspective in Portrait in Sepia.]

Isabel Allende's latest novel continues the saga of the Sommers and Rodríguez-Del Valle families, begun in Hija de la fortuna [Daughter of Fortune]. Eliza Sommers, the adventurous protagonist of the first book, is the illegitimate daughter of John Sommers, an English sea captain whose brother and sister settle in Santiago. Raised to be a proper young lady by her aunt (who writes naughty novels on the side), Eliza follows her lover Joaquín to California during the gold rush, but winds up marrying Tao Chi'en, a zhong-yi, or Chinese doctor.

The couple's daughter, Lynn, reputedly one of the most beautiful girls in San Francisco, is seduced early in Retrato en sepia [Portrait in Sepia] by Matías, son of Paulina del Valle and her husband, Feliciano Rodríguez. Paulina is a shrewd businesswoman who seized the opportunity to make a fortune in California, not by panning for gold, but by supplying the miners with goods. Using steamships, she makes a killing transporting produce and other merchandise from Chile to California. Matías inherits neither his mother's ambition nor her smarts, however. Instead, he gravitates toward San Francisco's countless brothels and opium dens. When he gets Lynn pregnant, he runs off to Europe, where he sinks further into decadence.

Severo del Valle, Paulina's hardworking nephew, falls in love with the girl and marries her, thereby legitimizing the baby, Aurora. After Lynn dies from a hemorrhage, Severo leaves for Chile to fight in the War of the Pacific. The formidable Paulina attempts to seize the child, but Eliza and Tao are determined to raise her. However, when Tao is murdered suddenly, Eliza brings Aurora to her paternal grandmother and disappears. After Feliciano dies, Paulina marries Williams, her butler, who masks his lower-class origins behind the accent and manners of an English lord, and returns to Chile. There, Williams mingles easily among the crème de la crème of Santiago society, and Paulina increases her fortune by pioneering the Chilean wine industry. She raises Aurora in the lap of luxury with the intention of marrying her off to a suitable husband. However, Aurora is plagued by a sense of mystery surrounding her background. She knows nothing of her mother's family, for Paulina has taken care to hide her Chinese ancestry. Furthermore, she is tortured by a recurring nightmare in which she sees pajama-clad children fleeing a Chinese man lying in a pool of blood.

Aurora resists the convent-school education that her grandmother tries to impose on her and instead takes up photography. On a trip to Europe she falls in love with a young man whom Paulina deems an appropriate match, even though Williams has misgivings. Aurora soon finds herself married to Diego Domínguez, the second son of a wealthy rural family, and stuck in a monotonous existence in an isolated area. She amuses herself by photographing the family, the landscape, and the Indians, and trying to please her increasingly distant husband. Eventually, she discovers that Diego is carrying on an affair with his sister-in-law, Susana. Aurora returns to Santiago, where she lives with a young doctor—an extraordinarily brazen move for an upper-class married woman at the beginning of the century. Eventually, Eliza Sommers returns from her travels and clears up the mystery of Aurora's past and Tao's murder, thereby freeing Aurora from her nightmares.

In Hija de la fortuna and Retrato en sepia Allende brings together a cast of fascinating characters—Chileans of all social strata (enterprising bourgeois, rancid traditionalists, revolutionaries, professionals, suffragists, Indians, and dandies), as well as British, Americans, and Chinese. The Chilean presence in California during the gold rush is a dramatic, but relatively unknown sliver of history. Allende brings to life the chaos and excitement of the period—the fortunes won and lost in an afternoon, the Chinese healers and the gangs, the straggly miners, the fops, and the hookers.

Unsurprisingly, Allende's most deftly drawn characters are women. The author takes a clearly feminist stance without ever becoming preachy or losing her sense of humor. Miss Rose, Eliza's aunt, is a feisty spinster who lost her virginity to a traveling opera singer and supplements her fortune by writing pornographic novels. Nívea, whom Severo del Valle marries after Lynn's death, is a progressive, feminist, and free spirit of sorts. She bears countless children who follow her around like a gaggle of geese, yet she never flags in her political commitments. Paulina maneuvers the waters of the business world—then, as now, dominated by men—with skill and determination. And Aurora defies the rules of Chilean society by working as a photographer, leaving her husband, and taking a lover.

Through characters such as Williams, the former ruffian passing as an English lord, Allende pokes fun at the social snobbery of the Chilean elite. The relationship between Eliza and Tao serves not only to elucidate both the splendor and corruption of San Francisco's close-knit Chinese community, but also the intolerance of California society which, in spite of the free-for-all atmosphere of the gold-rush era, takes a dim view of racial mixing.

Allende raises a number of other moral issues as well. For example, her descriptions of the brutality of combat, both in the War of the Pacific and in civil conflicts, force the reader to ponder human beings' seemingly infinite capacity of evil. A vibrant, richly woven, often humorous and sometimes hair-raising page-turner, Retrato en sepia is Isabel Allende at her best.