House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

For readers new to Isabel Allende’s work, this is the book I recommend reading first.

My immediate feelings when I finished the book were “spent” and “relieved.” It is not a simple book to read. Perhaps because it is a fiction that reads a bit like a history book. History being something that I love but have never liked reading, House of the Spirits tells the story of a complicated political and military history through the experience of generations of a family, particularly, (delightfully) of women… if you are a reader who likes a plot with a lot going on, you’ll be very happy here.

I wish all history books did read like this. My other feelings upon finishing were bittersweet because beautiful writing always makes me joyful but the story is not. In 2025, a few days from the Presidential inauguration, it was an unsettling thing to see my own instincts and predictions that I work to keep at the back of my mind laid out right in front of me. So clearly and even overtly warning that, “Yes, it can happen here. It can happen to you. It is already happening to others.”

This book was written 40 years ago, is explicitly current, and serves as a reminder that there have been women with the ability to put these cycles of injustice and violence into patterned perspective and to name it for us…

It makes me angry. And that is the last feeling I came away with from Allende’s book. It’s not anger at the characters or the plot or the writer. To her, I am so grateful. I come away with a personal anger that shakes its fist to the sky, to the women who raised me and to their ancestors. It screams to know why I had to find words like this on my own, at this time in life. Why have we been wasting so many childhoods, lives, and generations on church pews reading only one book? A book that doesn’t speak to us, it commands. Why? When voices like Ms. Allende’s were speaking not just for us but calling to us?

This is not an easy book. It is a gorgeous book. It is not filled with tropes about love and war and life. It chronicles those actual things. It is an incredibly important, beautifully truthful book and bone-chillingly current. If it’s not on your book list, it should be. If it is on your book list, bump it to the top. And then, send a copy to your mother.

-HR