This made for good beach reading. I love a cheap mass market paperback that you don‘t have to worry about getting beat up. I‘ve been reading this as a #buddyread with @hclaird and tracking our progress on Storygraph (awesome buddy read feature now!).
Allende‘s prose style is really beautiful, but the Dickensian coming of age story focuses less on an overarching plot and more on character sketches and episodic adventures in the MC‘s life.