[In the following review, Novella evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Daughter of Fortune.]

Chilean author Isabel Allende, having followed the culinary example of her Mexican colleague Laura Esquivel in last year's Afrodita [Aphrodite], presents us this year with Hija de la fortuna [Daughter of Fortune], a novel in which she leaves the kitchen behind and returns to traditional narration.

Over the four hundred pages of her new novel, set in the nineteenth century, Allende takes us from Valparaiso, Chile, to somewhere in California, covering the gold rush and its aftermath. She also includes a look back at events in Europe in the early 1800s, as part of the personal history of Rose Somers, one of her characters.

The story, which begins in the port of Valparaiso, is simple enough. A baby girl, born of a clandestine love affair, is abandoned at the house of the Somers family and taken in by her own father's siblings. She is given the name of Eliza Somers, and her real aunt, Rose, brings her up to be a proper young lady in the Chilean society of the early nineteenth century. Actually, as soon as she finds the baby left at her doorstep, Rose knows she is the daughter of her brother John, a sailor who spends little time ashore. This explains Rose Somers's interest in educating the girl in accordance with the social position of her British family. In addition to the training received from her Aunt Rose, Eliza also takes lessons in the service patio of her home, where Nana teaches her the secrets of the kitchen and other household occupations. Between her two “schools,” Eliza is well on her way to becoming a perfect lady and homemaker.

But Rose's plans are suddenly upset when, upon turning fifteen, Eliza falls passionately in love with a boy of modest circumstances not much older than she. Joaquín Andieta is the son of a seamstress and an unknown father. The love affair of the young couple abruptly changes the direction of the story.

The recent discovery of gold in North America attracts a greedy horde. Joaquín catches the fever and takes a ship to seek his fortune. But he does not know when he leaves that Eliza is expecting a child, since she herself discovers it only after he has gone. Anticipating Rose's reaction, she in turn boards ship, incognito, to search for her beloved Joaquín in the north.

Once Eliza has stowed away, with the help of the ship's young Chinese cook, Tao Chi'en, she begins to show symptoms of a complicated pregnancy that nearly kills her. Tao, also a doctor, does what he can for her and shares her secret with a young prostitute, Dolores Placeres, who is seeking the promised land. Eliza has a miscarriage but lives and reaches land with the help of her new friends.

Dolores then goes her own way, and Eliza begins to search for her lover. But her life is to be forever linked to Tao Chi'en through a close friendship that develops into platonic love on his part. From time to time Eliza leaves Tao in a fruitless search for Joaquín. She wanders from place to place asking for him, at which point his name, passed along from one person to the next, is changed from Andieta into Murieta.

Any work of fiction involves a certain amount of ambiguity. Here it concerns the true identity of Andieta-Murieta. Even Eliza herself wonders, at one point, whether she really had a love affair with Joaquín or merely dreamed it. We do not even know if Joaquín Murieta, bandit to some and dispenser of justice to others in Allende's own tale, is a deformation of the name Andieta, deriving from Eliza's inquiries, or her informers' confusion regarding a man who was beginning to acquire a reputation and who eventually becomes a legendary hero. The closest Eliza comes in her progress toward Joaquín is a man rescued from certain death on a frigid night by the inhabitants of the brothel where she had taken shelter. Eliza herself, applying the knowledge learned from Tao Chi'en, cuts off his two gangrenous fingers to save him from an even worse fate. The man leaves the group that had saved his life, and later Eliza hears stories about the fearsome Jack Threefinger, said to be the most trusted lieutenant of Joaquín Murieta.

Wearying of her futile search, Eliza writes Tao Chi'en to come for her and returns with him to the place where he has set up his medical practice. When Joaquín Murieta and his band are captured by the police, Eliza tries to recognize him as the lover who left Valparaiso two years earlier. Again we are uncertain whether or not he is Joaquín Andieta, Eliza's beloved, and she declares herself to be free of the past. That final equivocal statement fails to clarify whether the past is dead and cannot be revived, or whether her search has ended because she has tired of the quest.

Allende's narration flows with the natural ease we remember from her earlier books. The passage describing developments on board the ship in which a pregnant Eliza journeys to the North American coast is frighteningly realistic. She conveys the difficulties and anguish of Tao Chi'en, who doesn't know what to do with a female stowaway, dependent completely on his cunning in order to survive and to reach her destination strong enough to leave the ship without obliging him to reveal her hidden presence in the hold to the rest of the crew.

However, the best section of the novel is the chapter dealing with Tao Chi'en, from his humble origins in a distant village of his country to his education by the honorable teacher who instructed him in medicine. The description of Tao's childhood surroundings, his parents' poverty, his life and his training in the mysterious and sometimes inscrutable tradition of Oriental culture, is exceptional. Tao's stoicism, humbly offered wisdom, infinite patience, and ingenious responses to Eliza's observations make him tower above the other characters. At times, even Eliza is dwarfed by the presence of Tao Chi'en.

This episode seemed to be so well executed that I tried to recall where, in the back of my mind, I might have registered a character and a place so faithfully described. Then it came to me that in her book Paula, Allende was impressed by a Japanese doctor who took care of her young daughter, Paula, during her final days. I may be wrong. Perhaps my memory is playing tricks and the character of Tao Chi'en is not modeled on any real person.

The evocation of Tao's character may be one of Allende's strengths, but it is not the only one. She also provides us with a masterly description of that part of North America that was to become California at the height of the gold rush, painting a vivid picture of boisterous activity, chaos, avarice, unrelieved drudgery, and the broad range of lifestyles, habits, and dissolute ways of those drawn there by the gleaming precious mineral.

Hija de la fortuna [Daughter of Fortune] is an entertaining story and an easy, quick read. But unlike other of Allende's books, where all issues are resolved, this novel leaves one with the feeling that something is missing, that a number of loose ends need to be tied up. Several stories are left unfinished or trail off, while the ultimate fate of Eliza and Tao Chi'en and a number of other questions are left hanging. Nevertheless, this may please readers who like to draw their own conclusions and write their own ending.