A Long Petal of the Sea

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende, 318 pages

While his gregarious and rebellious brother Guillem enthusiastically charged into battle, Victor was a bit more reluctant to join the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, serving as a medic on the front lines. Guillem's girlfriend, Roser, is a piano prodigy who lives with Victor and Guillem's parents in Barcelona, and is pregnant when Guillem is killed in action. Thus begins a decades-long story of Victor and Roser fleeing the fascist country, spending time in concentration camps at the Spanish border with France, eventually escaping to Chile, and after settling there, once again becoming swept up in politics against their will. This is a straightforward tale of these two intertwined lives and the global political situations that affected them. While I sometimes wished for a bit more dialogue to break up the walls of text, Allende created an engaging and sympathetic story that truly made me care about these two very realistic people.