By Sheeva Azma
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Discovering the works of Isabel Allende changed my life both as a reader and a writer.
It all started in early July 2025, when I impulsively checked out The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende and read it cover-to-cover over the long July 4th weekend. I didn’t know when I checked it out that it was actually the Spanish version, so I got to use my rusty-but-improving Spanish reading skills and got help from the Google Translate app on my smartphone. The language barrier made no difference as I stayed on the edge of my seat (okay, more like the edge of my bed, since I like to read in bed!) and read the whole thing furiously over about a day and a half. I’m talking: falling asleep reading and waking up to read. Whew! My obsessive style of reading-for-pleasure is intense.
Published in 2023, the book — a historical fiction — starts out chronicling the events happening to a Jewish family living in Nazi-occupied Austria. The main character, Samuel Adler, is just a kid when his dad, a physician, disappears during Kristallnacht, a night of mass violence against Jews. To escape Nazi Germany, his parents send him out of the country. Decades later, living in Berkeley, California, he becomes the caretaker for a young hispanic girl who was separated from her mother when the mother was deported back to their home country of El Salvador after leaving for the US to escape violence.
Reading the book, I am left wondering if the whole purpose of the book was to compare Nazi Germany’s policies and events to that of the chaotic immigration policies we have seen from US leaders in the past two decades. It seems like a very decisive political analysis and statement to compare US immigration practices to the challenges of growing up in Nazi Germany. What’s more, even though the characters in this book are entirely fictional, the stories seem like they could be a good characterization of the human experience of an otherwise dehumanizing immigration system — both in practice and in media coverage. We have often seen people being rounded up and deported in the news but rarely with any real insight about who that person was or the circumstances of their life that brought them to this tragic moment in their life. Now that I’ve read The Wind Knows My Name, I want to know more about each of these peoples’ individual stories. Reading this book has made watching immigration news even more heartbreaking than it already was…and I am grateful to this book for giving me that gift of humanity.
The Wind Knows My Name was my introduction to Isabel Allende, who I’d heard about in my Spanish Literature classes at MIT (yes, they have humanities classes there) but never read. I also saw her on C-SPAN BookTV talking about her new book, My Name Is Emilia del Valle, which is supposed to be a complement to her famous book, The House of the Spirits, which she published much earlier in her writing career.
By the way, by the time you read this blog, I will have read both of those books, but as of writing this, reading time for them is scheduled into my calendar. It’s sad when you have to pencil in reading time so you can make sure you have time to read for fun. The only thing worse would be not having time to read for fun at all!
Watching her speak with Dr. Jill Biden, I realized that Allende and I have something in common — we’re both writers! I didn’t watch the interview to learn about how to be a writer — it just occurred to me when she was describing her writing process and career. That sounded so eerily like my life!
Creative professionals such as writers have a tough job, in a way — putting together words to inspire knowledge, joy, awe, or whatever emotion to stimulate the minds of their readers and tackle various difficult topics. There’s no instruction manual on how to do that, so it is nice to hear from famous and way more established writers on how they manage to harness their creativity in this regard.
Watching the BookTV interview, and reading her work, you will find many feminist themes — which I love right now. So, I next decided to read The Soul of a Woman, a shorter read (perfect for someone with little free time such as me), in which she explores what it means to be a woman through talking about her own personal experiences and reflections on feminism. It was one of those reads that decenters the men that you will often find in literature and emphasizes women’s experience and their historical marginalization.
Isabel Allende’s books are so empowering to me as a fellow woman writer. Reading them, it’s like she’s my personal cheerleader, as well as the cheerleader of women across the world. Her works tell the stories of marginalized women in the Spanish-speaking world and worldwide. That’s why I keep reading and discovering more of her works — to keep discovering these stories and finding personal connection to them as a woman. I hope to read more of her works in the original Spanish, as well, since I feel like there is so much more there than in the translations.
Are you a big Isabel Allende fan? What is your favorite book she has written? Chime in in the comments.
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