The Wind Knows My Name – Isabel Allende

The Wind Knows My Name – Isabel Allende

A friend lent me this novel. I wouldn’t have read it otherwise – I read something by her years ago and wasn’t that taken with it. However, I really enjoyed this one, so I am glad I read it.

Here’s the blurb …

This powerful and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019.

Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler was six years old when his father disappeared during Kristallnacht—the night their family lost everything. Samuel’s mother secured a spot for him on the last Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to the United Kingdom, which he boarded alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin.

Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz, a blind seven-year-old girl, and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. However, their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination she created with her sister back home.

Anita’s case is assigned to Selena Duran, a young social worker who enlists the help of a promising lawyer from one of San Francisco’s top law firms. Together they discover that Anita has another family member in the United States: Leticia Cordero, who is employed at the home of now eighty-six-year-old Samuel Adler, linking these two lives.

Spanning time and place, The Wind Knows My Name is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers—and never stop dreaming.

This is a novel about child refugees; a small boy fleeing Germany, a young girl and her dad leaving El Salvador, a mother and daughter also leaving El Salvador. It’s about acts of cruelty (both thoughtless and deliberate) and acts of kindness. It is about families – biological and the ones we make for ourselves. But, at its heart, it is about the strength of the human spiriit.

A review

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