It’s the story of three generations of strong women, in a world where women aren’t supposed to be strong, with a man as the common thread between them – it’s an incredible family saga, a powerful history of characters.  They are funny, eccentric, temperamental, ideal.

 You hate some and you admire some, still, they are all interesting and well drawn. There is violent, explicit sexuality that is hateful and despicable but at the same time totally exciting. There is so much raw human spirit that you are constantly lifted up to the sky and then thrown back down to the ground. The thing is, when you feel like something bad will happen, it will happen.

What I didn’t love so much about The House of the Spirits is that it witnesses to the most important part of Chilean history: the Pinochet era and it shows us what it “might” have looked like behind the scenes, what the papers were not reporting about that political struggle. But in Latin America these kinds of events are part of the history and they can not be told for the very censorship that this story speaks of, so they are told in novels and are thinly veiled as magical and exaggerated.

Overall I enjoyed this book, it’s layered, it’s complex, plus, it has one of the best opening and closing lines I’ve ever read.