Brina's Reviews > The Soul of a Woman

Hello, Goodreads. It’s been almost three months since I picked up a book due to an unexpected positive change in my life. I have always been a substitute teacher but during this school year I have worked everyday and when I say everyday I mean every school day for six to eight hours. I have worked in preschool and eighth grade and every grade in between, including a three week stint in a third grade classroom. The work has been rewarding but also exhausting, and when I walk in the door, the last thing my brain wants to do is focus on a book. The end of the year is in sight and I have a list of summer reading, fiction and nonfiction alike; needless to say I am ready to renew my favorite activity. With this busy schedule, I could not neglect Isabel Allende’s new book that I had put on hold at the library months ago. Allende has been part of my reading life since adolescence, so her books have priority. Lucky for me, this new manual is short, one that I was able to read in a few hours on a weekend morning.

Having read many of Isabel Allende’s books including three memoirs there is not much of her life that I do not know. In Soul of a Woman, she notes that she first became aware of being a feminist at age five. She noticed the gap between the roles of men and women in her native Chile and vowed not to repeat her mother’s life or to be subject to the traditional life of a woman in her country. A lot of what she says has already been stated in other memoirs: her childhood, her early working life, the unexpected success of House of the Spirits which lead to fame and enabled a long term writing career. Since that publication nearly forty years ago, Allende has given credence to Latin American women writers, becoming a leader and matriarch in the genre, spurning generations of new Latina writers, many of them I have been reading for years. Allende’s own protagonists are the type of women who she hopes become commonplace in Chile: go getters who do not take a back seat to the men in their lives. While this was not always possible, I believe Allende desired that women achieve a near equal status to men in Chile, and everywhere, having witnessed her mother’s and grandmother’s lives firsthand. Although machismo is inherent in Hispanic culture, going forward it should not have to be.

For new Allende readers, Soul of a Woman figures to be an enlightening experience. For me, it was like a visit with an old friend. Having experienced her words many times, this short volume felt like sitting down with a special aunt for a cup of tea. We may not spend much time together but the time we do have is to be cherished. This manual feels like a talk that Allende was unable to give over the past year or perhaps a graduation speech at a progressive school of thought. Despite having few stories that I did not already know, Allende’s words are well received by me. As she approaches eighty years, she vows to continue writing as her life nears the century mark. With her family’s genetic propensity toward longevity I hope this is the case. Isabel Allende is a special person and she never seems to run out of stories to tell. As long as she writes, I will read it, no matter how busy my life may be.

🌟 4 stars 🌟