Review: Maya's Notebook
Isabelle Allende
443 pages
Vintage Español (2011)
Read this if you like: Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Chilean history, genre-blurring coming-of-age novels
tl;dr summary: Teenager on the LAM finds refuge in a small village in Chile and learns about both herself and her family’s history in the process.
As a rule, coming-of-age narratives aren’t my favorite genre. I tend to find the protagonists a bit melodramatic and whiny—or, basically, they sound like teenagers, which means the writer did a great job capturing the right age with their voice but doesn’t mean I enjoy reading it.
At the start of Maya’s Notebook, I thought I was going to feel the same way about this one. The landscape of Chiloe was interesting enough for me to keep reading, but I’ll admit—I found Maya’s voice pretty annoying during the first few chapters. But I’m very glad that I kept reading, because this is one of those books that grew on me more and more as it went on.
What I think impressed me most about this book was how effortlessly Allende weaves together multiple layers of mystery, in such a way that the reader doesn’t even realize there’s another level about to come until it’s unveiled. Yet none of these moments feel like “gotchas” either. They feel more like epiphanies, growing organically out of the story and feeling obvious once they happen.
A lot of this comes out of Allende’s smart distribution of information throughout the story. The family backstory is revealed only in drips at first, the focus staying on Maya and her upbringing, setting up the loss of her Popo that leads her to Las Vegas. Nini’s story is relegated mostly to her role as Maya’s grandmother—sometimes seen as a comfort, sometimes as an adversary, in that way that caretakers who actually do know better can feel to teenagers who think they do. It isn’t until the second half of the book that the details of her past are filled in, along with those of Manuel Arias, the old friend of her grandmother’s that Maya is taking refuge with in Chiloe.
These are the details that, for me, took the book beyond a simple coming-of-age story. It expands the emotional stakes further than the teenage Maya—she’s still the epicenter of everything, the glue connecting the various storylines, but over time many of the secondary characters get their own full arcs, as well. The especially brilliant thing about this is the way it mimics Maya’s coming-of-age arc and growth as a person. She learns to see how her actions affect the people around her, and to see other people’s problems and feelings as equal in importance to her own, and in the course of these discoveries the reader is shown windows into the lives of a whole host of interesting characters—arguably, in my opinion, much more interesting than Maya is.
As someone who’s into genre-blurring, I also do love how this book is kind of like three novels laced together into one. There’s the over-arching narrative of Maya’s self-imposed exile on Chiloe. Then there’s the backstory on Chile when her grandma and Manuel were young, which veers into historical novel territory. In the middle and laced through the end there’s the events in Las Vegas with Brandon Leeman, which goes increasingly toward crime fiction or suspense as that arc develops. These three sections of the book are definitely distinct from each other, but not in a way that makes them feel disparate.
Of course, the risk of having this many interweaving plot arcs is that there will be some that read as weaker than the others. For me, the thread with Daniel, a traveler to the island whom Maya falls for, was the least compelling. It felt predictable in a way the rest of the book wasn’t, and also superfluous in a certain sense—Daniel is useful for some key plot movements, but it feels like that’s why he exists. He doesn’t feel as firmly anchored into the story as the rest of the secondary players.
But of course, the nice thing about there being so many different threads in a book—there was a lot of other stuff to pay attention to, beyond Maya’s sudden and consuming love for Daniel, and all of that was interesting enough to make me keep turning the page through the parts I found less interesting. It’s a study in how to make a complex story read as effortless, and it’s worth a read and study for that reason alone.
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