the fictional life of George Reeves, a man who started life under difficult conditions, neglect, and poverty. His story up to the age of fifty is told with compassion and understanding by switching viewpoints. Born to a father who is a self-styled preacher with a divine vision, "The infinite Plan", and a very learned but cold mother, George grows up in the Spanish barrio, being abused by other boys and fighting to live alongside of gangs. He meets the Morales family who shape his future and who to a degree make up for his uncaring, cold, and neglectful parents. Their daughter Carmen Morales becomes George's best friend for life. An intellectual man, Cyrus, shapes his mind as a mentor. George always struggles to survive, against all odds and against himself, through his growing years, inside the Vietnam war, then as a successful lawyer in San Francisco. When he takes on a workplace injury case, he has to leave the firm. From then on his professional life takes a downward fall. George throughout his life struggles with the pursuit of money and material possessions, alcohol abuse, his relationships with women, wives and children. His search for love and for his soul brings him around to the realization of what is really important.

all the characters. As always Isabel Allende creates wonderful characters. Aside from George Reeves' life the reader feels like she's inside those secondary lives as well.

read another book by Isabel Allende. She does that to me all the time. :)

the loneliness of the main character even when he was brave, like in Vietnam, and when he was surrounded by people, which he always was.

Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, where her father was a diplomat. She worked many years as a journalist. Her uncle was Salvador Allende, the elected president of Chile who was later brought down and killed by the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. Pinochet also exiled Isabel Allende together with other members of her family. Isabel Allende lived in Caracas, Venezuela, and later in California, USA. Her exile ended in 1988 when Chilean voters rejected another presidential term for Pinochet.


Isabel Allende is a fantastic writer with novels rich in character and plot, and epic in scope.

it like an epic you can't put down. The plot twists and turns all the time around most of the many characters whose lives, to the reader, become almost as important as George's.

I was amazed, again, at Isabel Allende's story-telling talent for weaving such an intricate plot with so many rich characters. She changed viewpoints back and forth from third person omnipotent to first person, as George, with great skill. Another author couldn't pull this trick so successfully.

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Created Mar 11, 2002 at 3:10am • Submit your own review...