Zorro by Isabel Allende

Historical Fiction

2018 A to Z Challenge - Z

Whew!  I did it!!!  I read a book starting with EVERY letter of the Alphabet!  And....for the most part they all came off my TBR shelves!  Zorro one was one of the few we had to purchase to meet the challenge.

I've read one other Isabel Allende novel (Portrait in Sepia) in 2017 for another reading challenge and much like that one, I enjoyed it but found my thoughts wandering at times throughout the book.  In Zorro, we delve into the character's fictional background and how he became the imaginary man that he is.  Some of the political background of Spain under Napoleonic rule and the New World settlement by Europeans got me a bit bogged down at times.  The novel spans 50 years and goes from California to Barcelona Spain and back again, so it's a lot to compress into an almost 400 page novel.

Of course, reading some of Zorro's escapades I recalled growing up with a reruns of the Disney's Zorro television show.  So I could easily picture these well-written scenes.  Allende incorporates humor and some intrigue by keeping the narrator of the book a mystery until the very end.

All in all it wasn't a bad read.  I would probably only recommend it to history buffs, Zorro fans, and the like as I don't think it would be captivating to all readers.

Quotes:  "...had become careless in matters of security, convinced that in the modern world there was no place for religious fanaticism.   They believed that the days of burning people at the stake were gone forever.  Now they were paying the consequences of their excessive optimism....where education, like everything else in the country was censored.  Many of his professors and companions had been arrest for expressing their opinions."

"He maintained that the powerful invented laws to preserve their privileges and to control the poor and discontented;...for example, taxes, which in the end the poor paid while the rich found ways to avoid it."

"...there is no such thing as absolute truth, that everything passes through the filter of the observer.  Memory is fragile and capricious; each of us remembers and forgets according to what is convenient.  The past is a notebook with many leaves on which we jot down our lives with ink that changes according to our state of mind."

#2018AtoZChallenge