The House of Spirits is Isabelle Allende's first novel. Allende is an amazingly prolific author with many books that have won a plethora of awards. She has also received many honorary degrees from a variety of univeritites and even a presidential award from President Obama.
This book was challenged in North Carolina to stop high school students from reading this book in school. I did find it a difficult book to read in many ways. It was a complicated book to follow, as there are many characters to keep track of, some having very similar names. It is written in the perspectives of two main characters, family patriarch, Esteban Trueba and Alba, his granddaughter.
The story follows the life of a family of four generations as they live through the post colonial social and political uprisings in Chile. There are so many realistic but hard to read experiences of what happens during these turbulent times.
The Trueba family's passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades.
The major characters in The House of the Spirits come from two opposing classes: the landed aristocracy and the peasants. Most of the population of Latin America, as well as all of the characters in the novel, belong to one of these two classes.
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