During the California Gold Rush, Eliza Sommers, raised as an adopted daughter in a wealthy Chilean family, follows her flamboyant lover to California--partly as a way of beginning her life over again. Allende's historical adventure novel touches on feminist themes such as the repressed upbringing of girls in Chile, the disgraceful treatment of Chinese prostitutes in America, and the rough life of frontier women.

"[A]n extravagant tale by a gifted storyteller whose spell brings to life the 19th century world....DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE, while entertaining and well paced, is frustratingly one-dimensional....Though Allende offers pictures of this darker world, they come across as mere snapshots, dwarfed by the sweeping historical panorama she's trying to paint...."       -- Thomas Curwen

"[R]eads like a bodice-ripper romance crossed with Judith Krantz, with plenty of feminist and multicultural seasoning thrown in to update the mix....Ms. Allende does little to dramatize her feminist sentiments--she simply hammers her points home with dogmatic asides, and starkly lighted tableaux of women being abused and taken advantage by men. Her people are equally simplistic and trite: evil outlaws, greedy opportunists and whores with hearts of gold. Eliza...never becomes more than a paper-doll figure...."
-- Michiko Kakutani

""[B]ecause Allende details her plot and settings more richly than her characters' inner lives, this derring-do saga feels somewhat spiritless."       -- Megan Harlan

"Allende goes on and on about waves of and torrents of passionate feeling but the reader does not experience them. You cannot be swept away by language which is by turns as bland, pompous, sentimental and over-elaborate as this; just as you cannot trust a narrative which lurches obliviously in mid-paragraph between omniscient and third-person perspectives, which rambling and repetitive, and which is stuff with over-long, over-detailed passages...which might have been copied out of reference books."
-- Michele Roberts