In the Midst of Winter

by Isabel Allende

I’ve always loved an Allende novel with her sensual and Spanish translated prose, crafty character development, and forbidden romances. Her newest novel, In the Midst of Winter, contains traces of her usual style but with a formulaic premise: A winter storm brings three unlikely individuals together in Brooklyn, New York and they share their stories, help each other through a difficult time, and their lives are changed forever. Ugh.

There is Richard Bowmaster, a middle-aged white, moody academic with a tragic past and a tiresome number of health complaints. There is Lucia Maraz, a passionate and lively Chilean woman living in Richard’s basement who for some reason is attracted to Richard. Then there is Evelyn Ortega, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who crashes into Richard’s car which happens to contain a dead body. Their lives and stories are unsurprisingly intertwined as they go on a freezing and tedious trip to dispose of the dead body, because this was the best solution to avoid deportation for Evelyn. In the meantime, they tell each other their life stories (over at least one pot brownie).

The plot, frankly, falls flat. The reader soon finds that Evelyn’s employer is a cruel man involved in a sinister business and the dead body may be related. It seems that Allende is trying to aim for social justice messages within the book, however, there are so many tragedies and sorrows packed in 340 pages (alcoholism, murder, human trafficking, suicide, children’s deaths, rape, immigration, MS-13, breast cancer, domestic violence, cheating and beyond) that the strongest potential messages seem watered down or incomplete. The three character’s current winter-driving and dead body dilemma distracts from their more captivating past stories.

Allende’s writing is most polished when she writes the stories of Richard, Lucia, and Evelyn although the writing still does not live up to the Eva Luna Allende that I so admire. Evelyn’s backstory in Guatemala and her harrowing journey to the United States is jarring to the reader, and most influential & empathetic in regards to current realities. I kept thinking that I wanted to read the book about Evelyn or Lucia or (maybe) even Richard more than the final product of In the Midst of Winter. The stories inside the main one are far more artfully constructed, but the book jumps from characters and past/present so rapidly that it feels garbled.

Even the book title implies that something good will come out of a terrible situation, which speaks to the predictability of the book overall. The obligatory Albert Camus quote “In the midst of winter, I finally found there was within me an invisible summer” was used in the forced and overly neat ending. Actually, the last chapter was a straight up mess.

While the general premise and plot were substandard, the character stories had the almost-Allende richness and development of her earlier works. I just wish I had been reading those stories instead.

Overall impression: Read a different Allende novel.