"My Name is Emilia Del Valle" by Isabel Allende

 

Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle.

Isabel Allende presents us with a stirring adventure story in 2025’s My Name is Emilia del Valle.  She conjures up an old fashioned hero for her first-person protagonist, an adventurous, iconoclastic young woman from 19th Century San Francisco. The product of a tryst between her novice nun mother and a mysterious progenitor who immediately leaves, she lucks out with doting, freethinking Papo, a stepdad who engenders in her a confident, not to say fearless, outlook. This brash worldview gets her into some extremely deadly jeopardy when she ends up on the losing side in the  the Chilean civil war. It’s vivid, captivating, enthralling work. 

As Emilia’s mother prepares to take a nun’s vows she’s swept up in a random tryst and immediately abandoned by a wastrel Chilean aristocrat. Emilia’s mother, Molly, earns the sobriquet “Saint Molly” for the good work she does teaching the children of impoverished Spanish-speaking denizens of the S.F. Mission District and for providing free bread to the neighborhood every day. Her marriage of convenience to don Pancho is a stroke of pure luck for Molly and especially for Emilia.

Emilia grows tall and strong and bilingual, and her Papo encourages her impulse to write down her thoughts and impressions. Grown into womanhood, she takes a male nom de plume and publishes dime novels in the 1880s, adding to the family coffers. This leads to journalism, working for the Hearst newspaper, the Examiner, where she meets reporter Eric Whelan and begins a reporting/column-writing partnership. The two partners travel to Chile to cover its civil war of 1891, and the adventure shifts into high gear. 

Allende writes adventure with pace, realism, and an unblinking eye toward human nature in all its wartime butchery. Our hero suffers physically and emotionally: she is beaten, starved, imprisoned. She must decide at length whether to investigate the spurious inheritance her biological father left her — it’s impossibly remote in southern Chile. 

You must read this faced-paced, gritty tale of a young woman’s determination and pluck, to find out. I heartily recommend this careening adventure tale, from a storyteller who proves her worth over and over.