A review by is_book_loring
Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

2.0

A story about a storyteller stumbled from one bizarre event to others while also telling stories of these eccentric personalities she met, came and went through her life, whom she loved or had loved her and shaped her life. Eva Luna herself, started as a rebellious orphan, full of wonder with fantastic imagination and streak of dramatic insanity that could surprise you when its infrequent but impressive occurrence. Weirdly enough, despite being supposedly such a talented inventor of fantastical stories, writing a telenovela about the story of her life was the big destiny of her existence. That and devoting her entire being waiting for her soulmate, revolving around men and falling in love with them or more like in love with her idealistic fantasy of romantic love and being disillusioned afterward. She ended up as a dull, damsel in distress who was flat, boring, loved by everyone, faultless and flawless. This very disappointing resolution mirrored the book story line, which was very interesting in the beginning with its alluring prose, sometimes beautiful moments, and odd but fascinating happenings, progressed to boring half-cooked political plot about guerrilla war and melodramatic telenovela itself. I lost interest halfway down the book and around last quarter of the book, I just wanted it to be over. It was not that bad, if one was into telenovela stuff, in this case, with stroke of perverse taste and sexual relationship in certain flavours, it just put me off from the already banal tale. The writing style was the saving grace for me, and some of the sideline characters were delightful.