by Isabel Allende
The year is 1849, and 17-year-old Eliza Sommers, like dreamers the world over, has headed for California. But unlike most '49ers, the heroine of this ambitious epic—an orphan raised by a wealthy spinster in the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile—has no interest in finding gold. Eliza has fallen for a poor Chilean laborer and has followed her beloved, unbeknownst to him or her family, to the Golden State. Allende (The House of the Spirits, Paula) paints a vivid portrait of the Gold Rush-era American "West, a land where greed both united and divided and where class, for a time, played almost no part. A plethora of secondary characters and subplots, however, slows Eliza's story. "Like everyone who came to California, we found something different from what we were looking for," her friend Tao Chi'en tells her. Readers may finish this novel feeling they have found less. (HarperCollins, $26)
Bottom Line: Sometimes glitters, but far from golden
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