The Wind Knows My Name

By Isabel Allende

Ballantine Books: June 6, 2023

272 pages, $28.00

The Wind Knows My Name is Isabel Allende’s 27th book since her brilliant debut, The House of the Spirits, in 1982. It begins in November 1938 with the Adlers, a small Jewish family in Vienna in the lead up to Kristallnacht. Their young son, Samuel, is saved by the Kindertransport to England, but his parents are unable to escape. Then the story shifts to 2002, where we meet Leticia, a young woman from El Salvador who as a child had crossed the border to the U.S. with her father after soldiers had massacred everyone in their tiny village (while she and her father were seeking medical treatment in the city). (This is based on the El Mozote massacre of December 1981, when the Salvadoran Army murdered nearly a thousand people as part of their campaign against FMLN rebels.)

A third narrative strand, set in 2019, focuses on Anita, a seven-year-old girl from El Salvador who is separated from her mother at the border and has ended up in a camp in Nogales, Arizona. Social worker Selena Duran is trying to help migrant children during the border crisis and recruits a hotshot young lawyer from a powerful firm to take on the search for Anita’s mother on a pro bono basis. (Naturally, he experiences a crisis of conscience about his lucrative work as a criminal defense attorney.)

All of this occurs in the first third of a 250-page book. Near the end of the book, Allende pulls the various strands together, but it’s all too neat and sentimental (suffice to say, we meet Samuel and Leticia again).

I can see what Allende intended with The Wind Knows My Name, but I’m sorry to say this is a misfire. She has tried to stuff too many stories into too short a novel. The result is a fast-moving but superficial collection of refugee stories. The characters are people we have met many times before and their stories are overly familiar. The book feels rushed, with far too much exposition and summary. And some of the dialogue is so cliched and wooden, it will make you cringe and wonder if she farmed this book out to a ghost writer.

Allende should have expanded the book to a length appropriate for all these narratives and characters so that she could work the storytelling magic found in her best novels. It seems like she has been rushing her books out in the last several years, opting for quantity over quality. This could have been a good book, but instead it feels like a draft. If you haven’t read anything by Allende, you are better served by starting with her early novels, The House of the Spirits (1982), Eva Luna (1987), and Daughter of Fortune (1999), and her memoir about the death of her daughter, Paula (1994).