It takes a certain kind of skill to write a boring book about a character like Zorro, and apparently, Isabel Allende possesses such. It also takes a certain brashness to pronounce your protagonist as “fun” in the first paragraph–and several times following that–and then fail to produce any real evidence of it.
I was excited about the prospect of this book–a great pulp hero like Zorro in the hands of someone with Allende’s lit cred? It’d have to be great, right?
It took maybe 20-30 pages to disabuse me of that idea. Allende’s narrator sets out to tell the origins of Zorro–starting with events years before his parents met, and then proceeds at the pace (and in a style) fit for a medium-sized biography. We’re less than 60 pages from the end before a 20-something Don Diego de la Vega returns from Spain to California and begins his career as America’s first superhero in earnest. This would be something like making the audience sit through 90 minutes of Aaron Smolinski and Jeff East working on the farm with Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter before Christopher Reeve catches Margot Kidder and the helicopter (and then foils Lex Luthor’s big nuclear missile into the San Andreas fault/real estate scam in 15 minutes).
Again, it read like a biography, and an unimaginatively written one at that. He did this and then he did that. He was this adjective, and was that often. Over and over and over–no showing, plenty of telling. For a couple of paragraphs on either side of a section of his life/escapades, the narrator would break in with a little commentary and bordered on developing an engaging voice, but that would disappear within a page. It had to be the slowest 390 page book I’ve read in years–I kept at it, waiting for her to pull it around once the setup was finished. What a mistake. Save yourself from following in my footsteps.
Victoria Jurgen is an honor student, a budding photographer with a heck of an eye, a social misfit, a movie geek (there’s a correlation of the two), who’s nicknamed herself after a SciFi movie character. All this makes her (a goal for her, a criticism for her mother) “boy proof.”