Review Detail

I was very excited when I received my advance copy of City of the Beasts because Isabel Allende is a wonderful, complex author capable of weaving a grand tale. The House of the Spirits, for instance, is breathtakingly wonderful.

I'm sorry to say that, while City of the Beasts has some good moments, it ultimately fails to live up to expectations. Part of this may be because we expect so much from Ms. Allende. She writes beautifully and naturally for adults, so why should it be any different for teens?

Sadly, though, it is. The characters in the book are generally flat and tasteless, like cardboard cutouts of real people. We feel distanced from them and from the story. When things happen -- drastic, exciting, scary and terrifying events -- the characters react with surprisingly little life. I wanted to shake them awake as I read. The dialogue is often stilted and constrained, and at other times preachy. Periodically the characters would say things after a traumatic event (like another character's death) that just seemed downright unnatural.

The descriptions of the setting, in contrast, are vivid and striking. Here Ms. Allende shows what this novel could have been. Set in the Amazon, readers are transported to another world, perhaps even another reality. Like the legendary Beasts, things seem to exist in slow motion, having a time and a rhythm all their own. You can tell that the author loves the land and the people. Her passion for nature and the preservation of culture is obvious, especially when judged against her stilted presentation of the characters. To me, it seems like this novel is really about the land and the characters are there in order that the story can be told.

The story centers around Alexander Cold, a fifteen-year-old boy sent to stay with his emotionally distant grandmother while his mother undergoes chemotherapy. He accompanies Kate (his grandmother insists that he call her that, one of the ways she holds him at arms length) to the Amazon in search of the Beast for a story she is writing for a magazine.

While traveling with a varied cast of characters, he and Nadia Santos become friends. Nadia is the daughter of their guide and is a strange, almost ephemeral, girl who can speak half a dozen languages and communicate with animals. The rest of the party are a mixture of power-hungry soldiers, pompous academics, and other sketchy characters. Many of them will die in horrible ways before the end of the novel, most of them barely mourned.

Alex and Nadia wind up deeply entrenched in the struggle to save the People of the Mist, the Indians that live in the region where the Beast reportedly resides. Breaking through barriers of culture and language, they discover their totem spirits and go through various trials that will test their courage. City of the Beasts is ultimately a coming-of-age novel and Alex grows from a slightly spoiled kid to a stronger, more mature spirit. This is shown in many ways, some more believable than others (he starts eating everything in sight, rather than insisting on American food).

In the end, he and Nadia manage to see through the political machinations of the evil-doers and are on their way to concocting a plan that will hopefully save the mystical and mysterious People of the Mist. Not all the various plot threads are wrapped up and the reader is left with some important questions unanswered, one of the most important being the health of Alexs mother.

The story contains lots of adventure and harrowing escapes that will thrill younger readers. One good thing about the distance she puts between the reader and the story is that even the most shocking events are told with a calmness that serves to remove the terror from them. Readers as young as ten should have no problem with any of the story elements.