ZORRO, Isabel Allende

This blog is nothing if not ecclectic -- from the Dalai La, which was in the magic realism genre. Other books were more straight forward, her book on erotica was full of prescriptions and not very erotic. But I respect her work and follow it's changes. A few weeks ago Barnes & Noble had a table of paperbacks near the door [unmissable] with a big sign saying buy two, get one free. Too tempting. Among the three I bought was ZORRO by Allende, which I had not been aware she wrote. The last two evenings I've plunge ahead toward the end, both eager to how she would solve plot problems and a eager to get done because I had grown tired of the perfect swashbuckler, the young man who was fashioning himself as Zorro by becoming superlative at all the needed skills, sword play, acrobatics, use of a bullwhip, riding, telepathy with his Native American "milk brother", slight of hand that let him win at cards without getting caught, etc., etc..

Allende wove in lots of California and Sp;anish history, rather glossily added Caribbean and New Orleans, ocean travel -- it got to be too much for my taste, But never boring and once caught up in lives of charcteres the human need to know how a story is resolved assets it self and the book has to be pretty bad -- i.e., so transparent that the characters are too shallow to support suspense. So it was a romantic, swashbuckling read. I had read nothing, really about the very early days of the Spanish in California, so that was new and interesting. But most of the read was not new and often exaggeratedly romantic so that I became impatient. Now I must turn to something with more substance. Swashbucklers are not for me.