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defiantfall 's review for:
The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
I chose this book primarily because I wanted to do a book review instead of a research paper for my Latin America geography class. I have to say it works well for that particular purpose - I have to relate the story back to Latin America itself in my review which the book does well in history/culture/generations - but as for leisure reading it was a little tedious for me.
There were so many paragraphs, whether because of translation or simply because they were written that way, that took up an entire page or more and it felt like it took too long just to get through them let alone a single chapter. Some of them contained a lot of unnecessary details that did not make them any easier to get through. The characters didn't stand out much outside of Esteban and Clara. It felt like Esteban and Clara were definitely given more time to be explored as characters than say Alba and Blanca who felt almost identical in some parts. A combination of the huge hunks of descriptions, little dialogue, and very little time spent on certain characters made it hard for the book to hold my interest.
Overall I'm neutral about this book. I don't love it but I don't hate it either hence the 3 stars. I haven't read an inter-generational story before so it was interesting to see how it unfolded even if the jumps in time didn't allow the characters to grow as much as Esteban and Clara. It's an honest book which I appreciate rather than trying to gloss over what happened and it's made me interested in reading more about Chilean history. While I don't regret reading I can only say it didn't leave much of an impact.
There were so many paragraphs, whether because of translation or simply because they were written that way, that took up an entire page or more and it felt like it took too long just to get through them let alone a single chapter. Some of them contained a lot of unnecessary details that did not make them any easier to get through. The characters didn't stand out much outside of Esteban and Clara. It felt like Esteban and Clara were definitely given more time to be explored as characters than say Alba and Blanca who felt almost identical in some parts. A combination of the huge hunks of descriptions, little dialogue, and very little time spent on certain characters made it hard for the book to hold my interest.
Overall I'm neutral about this book. I don't love it but I don't hate it either hence the 3 stars. I haven't read an inter-generational story before so it was interesting to see how it unfolded even if the jumps in time didn't allow the characters to grow as much as Esteban and Clara. It's an honest book which I appreciate rather than trying to gloss over what happened and it's made me interested in reading more about Chilean history. While I don't regret reading I can only say it didn't leave much of an impact.