The House of the Spirits

Tragic and poetic, and mixing a bit of fantasy with the harshness of reality, Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits challenges readers to look life's roughness in its face and cherish the romantic moments as best we can. Through the pages, one traverses generations of the Alba family's histories; hating some, loving others, and growing old with all of them.  Allende doesn't shy away from exposing the follies of her central characters, and its that fact that makes the story all that much more real. 

In the epilogue that sums up the memory of all that has passed, the reader gets a true sense of nostalgia as if they themselves lived and knew each of the characters' lives. Having recently reflected on generational histories myself with the loss of my grandmother, reading the end felt like a beautiful homage to the experience of being part of a family.

One ding I give this book? The sporadic and random shifting between narrators was a bit confusing and I didn't see much reason for it. In honesty, I only even realized what was happening there like a third of the way into the book, and then I had to Google wtf was happening. If it were up to me, I'd toss that.