Long Petal of the Sea (Allende) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Allende… has deftly woven fact and fiction, history and memory, to create one of the most richly imagined portrayals of the Spanish Civil War to date, and one of the strongest and most affecting works in her long career.
Paula McClain - New York Times Book Review
 

Less interested in scene than in sweep, Allende nonetheless describes her characters' emotions with great detail,… but I didn’t, at any point, forget that these characters were fictional.… [T]heir interiority felt forced…. A Long Petal of the Sea… [needed] a rigorous editorial process to support Allende’s noblesse oblige.
Kristen Millares Young - Washington Post


Allende’s latest… marks a return to the time and setting of the book that jump-started her literary career, The House of the Spirits, but with far less supernatural elements and a more expansive engagement of revolution, exile and the determination of the human spirit.…   A page-turning story rich with history and surprising subplots that keep the novel unpredictable to the end.
Rigoberto Gonzalez - Los Angeles Times
 

Isabel Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea gets to the heart of immigrant struggle… [It] begins, as it ends, with the heart… Victor and Roser’s story is compelling.… Allende’s prose is both commanding and comforting. The author writes eloquently on the struggle of letting go of one culture to embrace a new one and shows that one’s origin story is not the whole story.… While debate and policy surround the issues of refugees and immigration, Allende reminds us that these issues, at their core, are made up of individuals and their love stories.
USA Today


[A] sweeping saga.… Allende aims to explore something deeper about love than free and raw passion, though Petal has plenty of spicy pages and couples who yearn for each other.… At present, our culture seems to cherish stories that examine the cyclical rise of our darkest impulses.… Isabel Allende makes a similar point in a real-world way.… For while A Long Petal of the Sea is a historical love story penned in the lush and propulsive prose familiar to Allende’s millions of fans worldwide, it is also suffused with an additional noble and philosophical consciousness that feels excitingly new.
San Fracisco Chronicle


Isabel Allende has time and again proven herself a master of magical realism. Her latest novel… serves as a paean to human love and endurance.
Elle
 

Allende fans have been waiting with bated breath for her latest novel, and A Long Petal of the Sea doesn’t disappoint.
Marie Claire


(Starred review) Majestic… both timeless and perfectly timed for today.… Allende’s assured prose vividly evokes her fictional characters [and] historical figures… seamlessly juxtaposing exile with homecoming, otherness with belonging, and tyranny with freedom.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) A tale that is seductively intimate and strategically charming… a virtuoso of lucidly well-told, utterly enrapturing fiction.… Allende deftly addresses war, displacement, violence, and loss in a novel of survival and love under siege. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


Two refugees from the Spanish Civil War…. Allende tends to describe emotions and events rather than delve into them,… but she is an engaging storyteller.… A trifle facile, but this decades-spanning drama is readable and engrossing throughout.
Kirkus Reviews