Book Review: The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

My Rating:  3.75⭐️

In I938 Vienna, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, six-year-old Samuel Adler is sent to England via Kindertransport – his mother’s final gesture of love in a bid to save her son’s life. Samuel, a violin prodigy and the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust spends time in foster care among strangers before finally finding a home with a kindly Quaker couple. We follow Samuel’s story into adulthood, his move to the United States, and his love and talent for music playing an important role in the life he builds for himself.

Letitia Cordero was seven years old when everyone in her family, save for her father, lost their lives in the El Mozote massacre of 1981. Letitia and her father fled El Salvador, crossing the Rio Grande to enter America, where they eventually make a life for themselves.

In 2019, seven-year-old Anita Diaz and her mother, fleeing from violence in El Salvador, is taken into custody at the US-Mexico border while trying to enter the United States. Detained and ultimately separated from her mother Marisol, Anita, visually impaired after an accident that took the life of her younger sister, is left to fend for herself, shuttled between foster homes, alone and desperate to reunite with her mother. Anita copes with her fears and loneliness through conversations with her deceased sister and dreams of an imaginary magical world where she would be reunited with all of those she has lost. Selena Duran, a social worker attached to the Magnolia Project for Refugees and Immigrants, and Frank Angileri a lawyer from San Francisco who represents Anita’s interests pro bono, work together so that Anita is granted asylum while the search for her mother continues. After Anita endures a particularly traumatizing episode in foster care they manage to track down Anita’s distant relation, Letitia Cordero who is sheltering in place in her employer, the elderly Samuel Adler’s home during the pandemic. As the narrative progresses we follow Anita, Letitia and Samuel as their stories converge - three lives, impacted by similar circumstances, decades apart –– and how they impact and are impacted by one another- on a shared journey of hope and healing.

Touching upon themes of forced migration, sacrifice, loss, trauma, healing and found family, the author seamlessly weaves the three threads of this story together to craft a beautiful, heartfelt narrative that will touch your heart. Powerful prose, superb characterizations, fluid narrative, and the author’s masterful storytelling make for a compelling read. The pace is a tad uneven but not so much that it detracts from the reading experience. Though the three characters and their childhood experiences are set in different timelines, decades apart, the author draws out the similarities between historical events and contemporary politics and policies, in the context of the impact of the same on children whose lives are upended in the face of violence and war, forced migration and immigration policies and politics. The author paints a heart-wrenching picture of the plight of innocent children forced to flee their homeland with their fates and their lives in the hands of those who might not always be sympathetic to their cause. This is not a lengthy book (less than 300 pages) but definitely a timely and thought-provoking story. However, I would have liked it if a few aspects and characters in this story had been explored in a bit more depth and the ending did feel a tad rushed. But overall, The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende is an impactful read that I would not hesitate to recommend

Many thanks to Random House-Ballantine and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this beautiful story. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.