Publishers Weekly
★ 08/10/2015
Allende’s (The House of Spirits) magical and sweeping tale focuses on two survivors of separation and loss: the elderly, renowned designer Alma Belasco, whose silk-screened creations fuel the family foundation, and her young secretary, mysterious Irina Bazili, who works at the progressive old people’s home, Lark House, where Alma lives. Their narratives, however, go far beyond the retelling of Alma’s remarkable affair with a Japanese gardener’s son, Ichimei Fukuda, its heartbreaking end, and her subsequent marriage to loyal friend Nathaniel—or Irina’s heartbreaking struggle to break free of her haunting past. Allende sweeps these women up in the turmoil of families torn apart by WWII and ravaged by racism, poverty, horrific sexual abuse—and old age, to which Allende pays eloquent attention. “There’s a difference between being old and being ancient,” Irina is told. “It doesn’t have to do with age, but physical and mental health.... However old one is, we need a goal in our lives. It’s the best cure for many ills.” Befitting the unapologetically romantic soul bared here—the poignant letters to Alma from Ichimei are interspersed throughout—love is what endures. (Nov.)
USA Today
With The Japanese Lover, Allende reminds us that, while not everyone has a true love, we all have loves that are true. Whether they be passionate, familial, unrequited or timeless,the one constant in our lives is love. And Isabel Allende celebrates them all, beautifully.
Elle
"[An] epic novel from a master of the form."
Book Reporter
Thespectre of the war and the illicit treatment of Japanese-Americans are neverlost on the reader, although Allende is too subtle a writer to do any realproselytizing. It is a beautiful and significant love story that she tells,although I was so much more interested in her than in Ichimei as a character.
Times Union
"[Allende] is a dazzling storyteller, with a wry, sometimes dark, wit and a great eye for society's changing fashions. She may be writing a fairy tale for adults, but like the best of the genre, it's almost irresistible."
Lauren Conrad's Top 10 Fall Reading List
"...if you're a [Gabriel Garcia Marquez] fan, this one's for you."
New York Times Book Review
"[A] fairy tale of a novel...As in all of Allende's fiction, we find a large, colorful cast of characters..."
St. Louis Post Dispatch
With end-of-life issues looming over Alma, “The Japanese Lover” can’t be called lighthearted. But it’s often wryly funny, and always an absorbing argument for the power of love.
Book of the Week People Magazine
"Allende's engrossing narrative spans 70 years of tumultuous world history, but the powerful message you'll take away is that love all kinds of love will take root and endure under the most harrowing conditions."
Harvard Crimson
"TheJapanese Lover" erects two thematic pillars of love and prejudice toproduce a story that strikes a masterful emotional balance. More importantly,the novel crafts characters that are profoundly compelling in their complexstruggle to value love despite forces—youth and age, proximity and distance,society and self—beyond their control.
Associated Press
[Allende] is a dazzling storyteller, with a wry, sometimes dark, wit and a great eye for society's changing fashions. She may be writing a fairy tale for adults, but like the best of the genre, it's almost irresistible.
Miami Herald
"Like the incomparable storyteller she is, Isabel Allende does not release us from the novel's spell until the last pages, with a brief but bittersweet hint of her famed magical realism."
The Washington Post
"The Japanese Lover is animated by the same lush spirit that has sold 65 million copies of her books around the world... a novel that’s a pleasure to recommend."
Boston Globe
"Poignant, powerful ...a timeless world without 'tomorrow or yesterday.'"
San Francisco Chronicle
With her engaging new novel, “The Japanese Lover,” Allende brings us a tale at once global and rooted deeply in Bay Area history, sweeping through time and across continents to explore the inner lives of two very different women in contemporary California.
Purewow.com
"...rich with lyrical prose and compelling plot turns. This is Allende at her very best."
Bustle
"The Japanese Lover is a poetic and profound meditation on the power of love: a common theme, sure, but in Allende's capable hands this trope is made utterly new."
theSkimm
"The latest from the writer who's been called Gabriel Garcia Marquez's successor. It's a love story that covers a lot of ground, from Nazi-occupied Poland to present-day San Francisco. You won’t want to put it down."
Harper's Bazaar
"Monumental...A multi-generational epic of fate, war, and enduring love."
Goop
"[A] lovely, easy-to-read novel...Like a perfect onion, the book slowly reveals the secrets of Alma’s past, which primarily revolves around a secret, decades-long affair with a Japanese gardener."
The National
She is a dazzling storyteller,with a wry, sometimes dark, wit and a great eye for society’s changingfashions
Booklist
"Themes of lasting passion, friendship, reflections in old age, and how people react to challenging circumstances all feature in Allende’s newest saga, which moves from modern San Francisco back to the traumatic WWII years. As always, her lively storytelling pulls readers into her characters’ lives immediately… the story has many heart felt moments, and readers will be lining up for it."
The Missourian
"'Pretty brilliant,' I said once I closed the cover — literary fiction at its best.
San Jose Mercury News
"Allende...delivers a poignant story of race and aging, loss and reconciliation."
Booklist
"Themes of lasting passion, friendship, reflections in old age, and how people react to challenging circumstances all feature in Allende’s newest saga, which moves from modern San Francisco back to the traumatic WWII years. As always, her lively storytelling pulls readers into her characters’ lives immediately… the story has many heart felt moments, and readers will be lining up for it."
San Francisco Chronicle
With her engaging new novel, “The Japanese Lover,” Allende brings us a tale at once global and rooted deeply in Bay Area history, sweeping through time and across continents to explore the inner lives of two very different women in contemporary California.
USA Today
With The Japanese Lover, Allende reminds us that, while not everyone has a true love, we all have loves that are true. Whether they be passionate, familial, unrequited or timeless,the one constant in our lives is love. And Isabel Allende celebrates them all, beautifully.
Miami Herald
"Like the incomparable storyteller she is, Isabel Allende does not release us from the novel's spell until the last pages, with a brief but bittersweet hint of her famed magical realism."
Associated Press Staff
[Allende] is a dazzling storyteller, with a wry, sometimes dark, wit and a great eye for society's changing fashions. She may be writing a fairy tale for adults, but like the best of the genre, it's almost irresistible.
The Wall Street Journal
An alluring, sometimes magical tale…In its tumultuous story of rebellion and love among three generations, it is an allegory in which any family should be able to recognize a bit of itself.
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
The only cause The House of the Spirits embraces is that of humanity, and it does so with such passion, humor, and wisdom that in the end it transcends politics…The result is a novel of force and charm, spaciousness and vigor.
The Christian Science Monitor
Moving and powerful…Her novel captivates and holds the reader throughout…The House of the Spirits is full of marvelous and unforgettable women who add a special dimension to the book.
People
Allende’s writing is so inventive, funny, and persuasive that in the process of creating a stimulating political novel she has also created a vivid, absorbing work of art. Her characters are fascinatingly detailed and human.
Cosmopolitan
There are few trips more thrilling than those taken in the imagination of a brilliant novelist. That experience is available in The House of the Spirits … The characters, their joys and their anguish, could not be more contemporary or immediate.
New York Times Book Review - Alexander Coleman
Praise for New York Times Bestselling Author,
Isabel Allende
“Spectacular…An absorbing and distinguished work…The House of the Spirits with its all-informing, generous, and humane sensibility, is a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present, and future of Latin America.
Ellen Firer
Irina is a young Moldavian immigrant with a troubled past. She works at an assisted living home where she meets Alma, a Holocaust survivor. Alma falls in love with Ichi, a young Japanese gardener, who survived Topaz, the Japanese internment camp. Despite man's inhumanity to man, love, art and beauty can exist, as evidenced in their beautiful love story.
Library Journal - Audio
02/01/2016
Multiple narratives swirl around Alma Belasco, a Polish teenager who escaped the Nazis in 1939 and arrived in San Francisco to share a privileged life with an indulgent aunt and uncle. Now 73, Alma is a favorite resident in a senior facility, devotedly looked after by her grandson Seth and her caretaker Irina. Alma begins to divulge careful details of her well-guarded past to the young pair, revealing five decades framed by a never-ending passion for her one true—albeit impossible—love. Joanna Gleason mostly succeeds at voicing a broad range of ages, backgrounds, even ethnicities. That said, a few minutes of direction spent on pronunciation—Alma's cat's name is pronounced neh-koh for the Japanese word for cat, not knee-koh; the name Takao doesn't rhyme with "cacao"—would have led to a more accurate performance. VERDICT Beyond the colorful cast of surprisingly diverse characters, Allende's multigenerational saga seamlessly weaves in monumental headlines from the second half of the 20th century, from the Holocaust to the Japanese American prison camps, the French Resistance to postwar racism, the AIDS crisis to heinous child abuse, and more. ["Allende's latest, a glorious family saga…is a beautiful tribute to devotion": LJ 11/1/15 review of the Atria hc.]—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal
06/01/2015
Who is sending lovely little cards and gifts to Alma Belasco, a resident of San Francisco's Lark House nursing home? To find out, we'll have to go back to 1939, when Alma's parents send her from Poland to San Francisco to live with a wealthy aunt and uncle after Germany invades. She and Ichimei Fukuda, the Japanese gardener's son, fall in love but are wrenched apart when thousands of Japanese Americans are interned during the war. Through the decades, they keep their passion alive—and secret. With a ten-city tour.
NOVEMBER 2015 - AudioFile
Author Isabelle Allende turns her prodigious talents to the ravages of WWII in this story of Alma, a young Polish immigrant who loses her immediate family to Hitler’s concentration camps. Soon after, one of her best friends disappears into the Japanese internment camps in the American West. Joanna Gleason narrates both the historical events and the modern story as Alma’s caretaker tries to piece together Alma’s secrets. Both story and narration are at their best during the WWII parts. Here Gleason’s voice wraps the listener completely into the events with her passion for the characters. However, when the plot switches to modern times, both Allende and Gleason seem to lose interest, and the story drags. J.L.K. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2015-09-03
Honored last year with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her inspiring fiction and soul-baring memoirs, Allende (Ripper, 2014, etc.) offers a saga of a couple that keeps its affair secret for the better half of a century. One of the lovers, Alma Belasco (nee Mendel), was barely 8 years old when her Polish parents, fearing rumors of war could prove true, sent her to live with her wealthy American uncle and aunt in San Francisco; bereft yet stoical when she arrives at Sea Cliff, she found allies who were destined to become "her life's only loves": her shy but devastatingly handsome and uber-intuitive cousin Nate Belasco; and her childhood playmate Ichimei Fukado, the charismatic son of the Belascos' gardener, whose family was sent to an internment camp following the attack on Pearl Harbor. That this trio will ultimately help sort each other out is foregone, though how and when is not immediately clear. Allende prolongs the suspense, sprinkling Ichi's soulful letters to Alma into the narrative of her postwar career as a textile artist with an outwardly perfect marriage and her abrupt decision to move out of the family estate into a Spartan room at Lark House—a slightly whackadoodle senior living residence that was bequeathed to the city by a chocolate magnate. At times Allende's glib humor misfires ("I get them hooked on a TV series, because nobody wants to die before the final episode," quips a member of the cleaning staff) or seems stunningly off-key ("Mexico greeted them with its well-known clichés"). Some readers may wince at a closeted gay character's soft-serve admission: "Hearts are big enough to contain love for more than one person." But among the white ponytailed hipsters and yoga-practicing widows at the senior center, Alma stands out—she's haughty and self-centered and, after decades in the rag trade, "[dresses] like a Tibetan refugee." She's also a bit of a yenta: she deploys her part-time secretary, Irina (a doughty 23-year-old Romanian émigré), and grandson Seth (Irina's love-struck suitor) to put her letters, diaries, documents, and other detritus in order. Then she toodles off in her tiny car every few weeks with a small overnight bag. Packed with silk nightgowns. Could this 80-something woman actually be meeting a lover, wonders Irina (who is grappling with some secret baggage of her own)? Just you wait. Vividly and pointedly evoking prejudices "unconventional" couples among the current-day elderly faced (and some are still battling), Allende, as always, gives progress and hopeful spirits their due.