“With vivid imagery, Eva Luna* transports the reader to an almost mythic continent where magical happenings are everyday events.”*

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Now that I am older, I see the stereotypes in this story much clearer: the tragic mulatto, the man-as-savior, romancing the rebel, the older man/ younger woman and probably more that I cannot identify. Oh yes, the gay best friend who becomes a transsexual.

Eva Luna, the main character and narrator, spends her life in an unnamed South American country. Orphaned at six years of age, her mother’s coworker takes responsibility for Eva.

She makes her living as a domestic before she agrees to sell her stories. (She initially writes scripts for soap operas.)

The reader may be allowed to guess that Eva lives in Venezuela, considering that’s where Isabel Allende was living while she wrote it. (Allende was born in Peru but she considers herself Chilean because that is the nationality of her parents.)

A verbose and descriptive story, there is plenty of sensuality which was a key draw the first time I read it. I still don’t hate this story, it just doesn’t move me the way it did when I was a teenager. It seems melodramatic now.

Perhaps that’s a sign I’ve grown some. Change is inevitable and in this case, good. You’re expected to like different items with the passage of time. A bit worrisome if nothing about a person evolves.

Since my early to mid-20s, I’ve moved into reading nonfiction. I guess because I am always daydreaming, why read constantly of someone else’s imagination? It would be an overload of fantasy.

Eva Luna is no longer my favorite novel. Something else may arise. I won’t be searching too hard.