Daughter of Fortune - Isabel Allende

Written by Isabel Allende
Read by Blair Brown
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Harper Audio/Recorded Book
Date: 2005/2008
Length: 13hrs

I found this review that does an excellent job detailing this complicated novel.

Allende expands her geographical boundaries in this sprawling, engrossing historical novel flavored by four cultures–English, Chilean, Chinese and American–and set during the 1849 California Gold Rush. The alluring tale begins in Valpara so, Chile, with young Eliza Sommers, who was left as a baby on the doorstep of wealthy British importers Miss Rose Sommers and her prim brother, Jeremy.

Now a 16-year-old, and newly pregnant, Eliza decides to follow her lover, fiery clerk Joaqu n Andieta, when he leaves for California to make his fortune in the gold rush. Enlisting the unlikely aid of Tao Chi’en, a Chinese shipboard cook, she stows away on a ship bound for San Francisco. Tao Chi’en’s own story–richly textured and expansively told–begins when he is born into a peasant family and sold into slavery, where it is his good fortune to be trained as a master of acupuncture.

Years later, while tending to a sailor in colonial Hong Kong, he is shanghaied and forced into service at sea. During the voyage with Eliza, Tao nurses her through a miscarriage. When they disembark, Eliza is disguised as a boy, and she spends the next four years in male attire so she may travel freely and safely. Eliza’s search for Joaqu n (rumored to have become an outlaw) is disappointing, but through an eye-opening stint as a pianist in a traveling brothel and through her charged friendship with Tao, now a sought-after healer and champion of enslaved Chinese prostitutes, Eliza finds freedom, fulfillment and maturity.

Effortlessly weaving in historical background, Allende (House of the Spirits; Paula) evokes in pungent prose the great melting pot of early California and the colorful societies of Valpara so and Canton. A gallery of secondary characters, developed early on, proves pivotal to the plot. In a book of this scope, the narrative is inevitably top-heavy in spots, and the plot wears thin toward the end, but this is storytelling at its most seductive, a brash historical adventure.

As far as can find, this is the only professional recording of the book and is also used by CNIB for distributing to the blind.