Please Note:  I received an advance copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.  This did not influence the opinions in my review in any way.

Synopsis (from Goodreads):

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family of five boisterous sons. From the start, her life will be marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.

Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses all and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. . . .

She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, times of both poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life will be shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and, ultimately, not one but two pandemics.

Review:

I have read many books by author Isabel Allende. starting with The House of the Spirits (from 1982) to her most recent novel, Violeta.  She writes lovingly of the people of her native Peru, but not of it's historically corrupt government.  She has a way of making historical events come to life through the characters in her books.  While I liked the characters in Violeta, and appreciated the one-hundred year span of the story, I wasn't blown away by this book.  I think the reason for this was the format that she used for the story's structure. It made it hard to connect with any other character besides Violeta, herself.

What I Liked:

Historical Details:

Although Violeta never tells us which country in Latin America she is from, we can guess from the details of the book that it is the author's home country of Peru.  I really appreciated how she wove in the evolution of the country's political history along with the story.  All I knew about Peru before this book was what Allende wrote about in The House of The Spirits.  The brutal and corrupt military dictatorships of the late nineteen-sixties on through the nineteen-eighties, brought unimaginable heartache to civilians.  But this book puts this in a larger historical context.  

Characters:

Violeta begins life as a pampered child in a large, wealthy family, complete with an English nanny.  But very quickly her family's fortunes change and the real strengths of the characters begins to show.  

The nanny, Miss Taylor, shows resilience as she has to move on from being a nanny to making a life for herself in a new country.  Once she is free from the social constraints of being a proper member of a rich household, she realizes she is drawn to Teresa, a free-thinking woman who isn't afraid to live life on her own terms.  I loved these two characters and would love to read an entire book about them!

Violeta's brother, José Antonio, turns out to be a strong, dependable supporter of Violeta and her mother.  As their father lost their fortune and later dies, the family is thrown into debt.  But José Antonio does what he can to keep everyone together.  

Violeta, over the long course of her life, has a number of relationships with men, and it is hinted that she had affairs with women, as well.  Her longest, and most volatile relationship is with the dashing Julian.  He sweeps her off her feet, and their passion turns her life upside down.  But, Julian shows himself to be a brute.  And for all of Violeta's strength, she just can't resist him.  Their relationship is very complicated and I thought the author did a good job of exploring this. 

What I Didn't Like:

Structure:

The story tells Violeta's life in a series of letters to someone in the present day.  Much of the story centers around Violeta's love life.  I just didn't believe Violeta (a one-hundred year old woman) would write letters freely discussing intimate details of sexual encounters!  While we don't know until near the end of the book who she is writing to, this just didn't seem realistic.

The letter format also made the novel limited in scope to only Violeta's point of view.  With such a rich array of characters to explore, I wish the book would have been written in more of a narrative style, so we could dig deeper into some of the other characters.  I would have loved to read about Violeta's nanny and her affair with a woman.  This was in a time when people would never be openly gay, so I wanted to know more about the obstacles the couple faced.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Release Date:  January 25, 2022

Author:  Isabel Allende

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Genre:  Historical Fiction

Page Length:  336 Pages

Source:  NetGalley

Format:  E-book

Recommendation:  Although the format limited the story, this is another solid offering from Isabel Allende