Whenever I go on a trip I always take a book to read. On this latest trip to Ohio I actually took two books with me.
One of them I had nearly finished... yet another novel by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende. This one was called "Violeta".
The funny thing is that I had bought a copy of the book in Spanish at a book stand here in Mexico City. I did not realize that I already had a copy in English which I had purchased in Ohio prior to my move. Well, I had started the novel in Spanish, so I just continued with it. I have read many of Allende's novels, but ironically, this was the first time I had read anything by her in the original language. It was fairly easy reading. The occasional word that I did not know, I could either skip over or get the meaning from context.
The title character is a Chilean woman who is born in 1920, when Chile, along with the rest of the world is devastated by the Spanish Flu epidemic. She lives to be 100 years and sees the COVID pandemic of 2020. Her long life is shaped by many historical events over the course of that century. It was another very good read from Allende.
After finishing "Violeta", I turned to the other book that I had brought along. It was another historical novel, "The Kitchen Boy" by Robert Alexander.
The protagonist is a young servant who works in the house where Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and children are kept as prisoners by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. And it is this kitchen boy who is the only outsider to witness the brutal murder of the royal family in the cellar of the house. I'm not going to give the ending away, but it is a surprising twist. (And, no, Anastasia does not survive the firing squad.)
It is a thin volume, and I finished it on the return flight to Mexico City. Highly recommended for those who like historical novels.
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