This is another heartwarming and powerful story spun by Isabel Allende. She has woven together a story of two very different young people separated from their families, their cultures everything they were born into and forced to leave their native lands. She tells the stories of a young Jewish boy from Austria who lost his family in The Holocaust and a young Mexican girl caught in the immigration struggles into the US 60 years later.

A New Life in a New Land

Interesting and informative this is a story of immigrants and how it travels from one generation to another. The story of different generations of this immigrants and how they came to be and how their lives were impacted.

Sometimes sad, sometimes happy this is a story of different people, different times and different circumstances. It shows the desperation that some have to leave violence behind for a new life in a new land.

Each person and each case is different, but somehow connected to the others. It is a story of compassion and help for the less fortunate that wish to find peace.

Thanks to Isabel Allende for writing the story, to Random House Publishing for publishing it, and to NetGalley for providing me with a copy to read and review.

Random House Publishing 6-06-2023

Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian novelist, once said that when she's writing a novel, the first thing she does is decide on the topic she wants the novel to address. This was in the context of a conversation (not with me) in which she explained that her novel The Joys of Motherhood was written to explore issues of family planning and population.

I'm just going to be honest here. The Wind Knows My Name is a lovely read that draws together historical threads in an important way. Allende has a topic. She always has a topic, and her topics are always important. But with her last few novels, I've been feeling that topic is overwhelming her characters. She's not being didactic exactly, but the characters no loner seem fleshed out in the delightful way they once did in her work.

Is this the case? I could be misremembering reading and loving some of her early works, but I don't think so. The last time I read one of her books and had the pleasure of sinking into a central character and getting to know her well, was with Maya's Notebook.

That said, I did enjoy reading The Wind Knows My Name, and I will be recommending it to others. The structure of this novel—presenting parallel threads dealing with the WWII kindertransport and the Trump administration family separation policy is powerful. They're not the same, and/but looking at them simultaneously helps readers observe and think in ways they might not otherwise do.

Read The Wind Knows My Name. You will find it worthwhile. But I'm so hoping for an upcoming novel from Allende that will be less episodic in structure. I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

The Wind Knows My Name has a beginning that sounded eerily familiar to something that I had read not too long ago, but that’s what happens when there is a saturated historical fiction genre that is teeming with World War II relics. I thought about putting it down, but there was something intriguing about this tale when it goes to the present timeline that kept me on the hook, and I am so glad that I stuck it out.

The novel jumps all over the place, the past, the present, and different characters in both, which can be a whirlwind keeping everyone straight. There were moments that I wondered how everything would tie in together, but once I saw the amazing tapestry that was woven with the author’s words and the stories she told, I was left in awe. Each individual story is interconnected in such a sweet a poetic way that its overall beauty is breathtaking.

Having family that lives near a major Mexican border, and family that is also Hispanic, made the whole migrant story hit me incredibly hard. I have seen first hand what these immigrants have to endure and my heart always aches for them. What kind of unimaginable horror did some have to face to want to embark on such a trek, leaving everything they know, and stepping blindly into the unknown, all to possibly be mistreated or left to die.

I know immigration is a hot button topic, but when you take out the politics and focus on the person it changes your perspective tremendously. What would you do if you or someone you loved were in this situation? What would you do? I feel like the author handled this part of the story incredibly well, and I think this would be a great novel to get this tough conversation started.

I am so glad this wasn’t just another World War II novel, and that it took a different approach of showing that what happened back then, with lives being torn apart and families being murdered, parallels what is happening now at our borders. This novel feels like a call to action as there really does need to be more done and I appreciated that there was a strong underlying message while also being a deep, yet entertaining read.

The Wind Knows My Name. Is so masterfully written and is such a powerful story that needed to be told, and most definitely needs to be heard.

Published simultaneously in Spanish and English; published in translation by Ballantine Books on June 6, 2023

The Wind Knows My Name tells the stories of three American immigrants who were forced to leave their homelands to escape oppression. A Jewish child who escaped from Austria in 1938 thrives in the US. A Salvadoran child who entered the US in 1969 makes a happy life for herself. During the pandemic, a child from El Salvador whose mother fled domestic violence is at risk of being deported. The story is a powerful reminder that America is shirking the role it once embraced as a sanctuary for those who are “yearning to be free.”

The novel begins with the stories of two children who survived attempts to exterminate their communities. Samuel Adler’s parents send him from Austria to Great Britain before they die in the Holocaust. Leticia Cordero is in a hospital, away from her village in El Salvador, when the village is destroyed by soldiers who believe that its inhabitants might be harboring insurgents. Her father, the lone survivor in her family, smuggles her into the US.

Samuel grows up to play the violin in the London Philharmonic, although his true love us jazz. On a visit to New Orleans, he meets the rebellious Nadine LeBlanc. They might not be a perfect fit, but she is the love of his life. They are together and apart at various stages of their lives, but Samuel explains that they “invested so much into our relationship that it was always worth saving.” The need to accept the inevitability of change is one of the novel’s themes.

As an adult, Leticia’s father and husband die within months of each other. A friend helps her begin a career as a cleaner.

The third set of principal characters includes Selena Durán, a social worker who deals with migrant children at the Mexican border. She recruits a prestigious law firm to help Anita Díaz, a blind child whose mother was denied asylum (the gunshot wound in her stomach wasn’t enough to prove her life was in danger). Anita is being held with other detained children while her lawyer, Frank Angileri, fights to win her asylum claim. Frank and Selena also search for Anita’s mother, who wasn’t officially deported but doesn’t seem to be in the country or in the refugee camps on the Mexican side of the border.

The lives of characters intersect as the novel progresses. Some fall in love. They cope with misfortune in different ways. Leticia smiles and rumbas and refuses to be gloomy. Anita has long talks with her dead sister.

The stories are tied together by the theme of oppression and survival. The Holocaust, the destruction of villages during the Salvadoran Civil War, the Maya genocide, the Salvadoran femicide, and the plight of refugees who are denied the right to make a case for entry into the US all contribute to that theme. These are big themes, but they are explored through the lens of small stories, personal stories, one way in which fiction distinguishes itself from history.

Perhaps connection is the novel’s strongest theme. Characters are connected by family bonds, shared experiences, and employment. Three characters who are not related to each other in any meaningful way eventually live together as a family, illustrating the changing nature of what the word “family” means. Samuel’s marriage to Nadine was long but unconventional; Selena resists the white-picket-fence domestic life that her fiancé envisions and might want a different kind of family.

Characters are also connected by shared values that so many Americans have lost, including the belief that the government should not separate families. As Selena remarks, too many Americans only value white children. Beginning with slavery, keeping nonwhite families intact has never been an American priority. It is nevertheless a priority to characters who are bonded by their shared experience of forced separation from parents.

Isabel Allende gives a fullness to her characters that should be expected from literary fiction. Samuel, near the end of his life, embraces the pandemic because it allows him “to distance himself from people he didn’t like and free himself from obligations that no longer interested him.” He disguises those standoffish traits with a façade of friendliness and a reputation for eccentricity that comes with his British accent. At the same time, Samuel is a compassionate man who is moved by the experiences of Leticia and Anita, experiences of being uprooted that parallel his own.

Although key characters are victimized by villainous people — human traffickers, men who rape and kill women — the villains are collateral characters in the story. The novel focuses on positive responses to evil rather than evildoers. This is a moving story about the things that should bring us together at a time when culture warriors strive to tear us apart. The Wind Knows My Name is a truly enriching novel that probably won’t be read by the people who would most benefit from its message

RECOMMENDED

Isabel Allende has quickly become my favorite translated author. Her novels always inform and enlighten, and I come away feeling as though I can make a difference in this world, however small.

This multi-generational novel delves into the heinous practice of separating children from their parents during wartime or political unrest. In the case of Kindertransport during WWII, parents did this out of necessity and desperation. In the case of the Zero-tolerance immigration policy of 2018, children were forcefully separated from their parents at our border. Allende approaches each situation with resolve and compassion, and I learned so much.

It fascinates me that I read stories about certain things in clusters, without ever meaning to. I just finished another novel that discussed this very same topic, and while it was a dystopian novel, it still brought to light all the times this has happened in our history😢.

This story took a little longer to piece together, by the author's design, but I also believe the translation made it slightly disjointed. But it is still a story well worth reading!

Many thanks to partner, @penguinrandomhouse for this #gifted early reader's copy! I'm always happy to read an Allende novel!

This book is exactly what I expected from isabel allende! Phenomenal writing, engaging story telling, and magnificent attention to detail and sensitivity to issues mentioned.
The way the author incorporated historical events was so seamless you wouldn't think you're getting a history lesson.
Whenever I saw something mentioned that I didn't know about, I knew it was important because its isabel allende and so I'd look it up and just kept learning all throughout.
The characters are all so realistic and fleshed out and as usual this in my opinion is required study material. The translation was brilliant too! Thank you for the arc!

Yet another fascinating novel of historical fiction from Isabel Allende. The author in her impeccable style, cleverly weaves together the stories of an orphan boy separated from his parents in Austria during World War Two and an abandoned girl from El Salvador who is an undocumented immigrant to the USA. We meet several interesting characters along the way. An interesting insight into the Nazi atrocities in Vienna and the present-day migrant crisis on the southern borders of the United States. The book was a fast-paced unputdownable read. Totally recommend.

Let me start this review by saying Isabel Allende is an author my mom loved (and still loved today) back when I was a tween and teen and I read so many of her books starting with the House Of The Spirits by „borrowing“‘from my mom‘s shelf. Since then we have passed her books back and forth reading them either in Spanish or in English and they are just so good - her historical fiction is absolutely brilliant.
I was very excited and jumped at the chance to read her newest one. This book takes the border crisis and refugee minors separated from their adults and draws parallels to Viennese Jews sending their kids to England in 1938 and refugee kids coming to the US fleeing military massacres in the 1980s. It takes the individual cases of Samuel, Leticia and Anita to show the reader what drives parents to take these drastic steps and the impact this has on kids and the trauma that stays with them, maybe in their dreams, maybe even for over 80 years. This would not be an Isabel Allende book if healing wouldn’t be possible, and these stories wouldn’t come together beautifully- in this story at least empathy has the power to affect change, and is a hopeful, albeit inconsistent, follower of migration.
I found myself inspired !

I DNFed at 51%
It just didn't interest me enough and I kept getting swayed by other books. Probably would have been a 2.5 Star

Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht. His mother secures him a place on a Kindertransport train so that he can be safe.

Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Díaz and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. Anita and her mother are separated at the border.

Both of these people are on a journey that is very difficult. They are in search of a home and family. This is a wonderful and very powerful story.

After reading and loving Allende's previous novel Violeta, The Wind Knows My Name immediately became an anticipated book of the year for me.

In The Wind Knows my Name, Allende draws parallels between the Holocaust in the 1930s and the current immigration crisis at the U.S. southern border. We have two kids from two different time periods who are separated from their families.

In 2019, seven year old Anita Díaz and her mother flee from El Salvador seeking refuge in the United States as the new family separation policy is underway. Anita and her mother are separated and she is left completely alone at a refugee camp in Nogales, Arizona.

In 1930s Vienna, five year old Samuel's father disappears during Kristallnacht. As safety conditions worsen for Jews in Austria, Samuel’s mother secures a spot for him on a Kindertransport train to England from Nazi-occupied Austria. He travels alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin.

I loved the story told and the empathy Allende imbued into each narrative.

I wish we would've had more time with both Samuel and Anita. This is a multi-POV story that spans more than 70 years. Allende touches on a variety of topics from immigration to the rampant femicide in El Salvador. There were too many moving parts and not enough time to delve into all of them with the care they needed.

These are important narratives to read; I just wished the execution was a bit tighter.

If you love multiple-POV stories with hard-hitting topics I'd still recommend to pick it up if the subject matter interests you.

Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for an advanced reader copy.

This is an unusual story of two people orphaned and forced to immigrate at very young ages and decades apart who eventually wind up together. Samuel is the son of Jewish parents living in Nazi-occupied Austria. When his father is sent to a concentration camp, Samuel’s mother manages to get him on a train transporting Jewish children out of the country before she herself is captured. Samuel is eventually adopted and raised in England and then immigrates to the USA finally settling in Berkeley. Now, eight decades later, Anita is separated from her mother at the Arizona-Mexico border due to the immigration policy of 2019. Her case worker, Selena manages to enlist the help of a San Francisco based attorney named Frank to secure asylum for Anita and they convince Anita’s distant cousin, Letitia to agree to foster her while they search for her mother. Coincidentally, Letitia is the live-in caregiver of the now 86 year old Samuel who readily agrees to take Anita into his large home in Berkeley.
Isabel Allende is one of my favorite authors. I’m not surprised that she took on such a major current political issue and developed a realistic and compelling story around it. The border policy of separating children from parents is a stain on our history and Samuel summarizes this atrocity well when he compares it to slave owners selling children and Native American children being separated from families throughout US history. The current complications of immigration and the horror of human trafficking are described and explored very well in this book. The duel and closely related journeys of Samuel and Anita (traumatic abrupt removal from parents, multiple foster placements and finally stable permanent adoption) is such a creative storyline - so well done! I enjoyed the book very much but I did miss the more epic nature of the stories that we usually get from Allende. There were a few aspects that just seemed out of place and unnecessary such as certain romantic relationships (no spoilers) and I would have liked better character development and background information that the author usually provides.
#NetGalley #RandomHouse-Ballantine

I love books like this that span large chunks of time and cross borders into many countries. What this book does especially well is prove that while we think the world is huge, it’s actually quite small and our life stories cross more than we think they do.
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Separated by over 70 years and in vastly different parts of the world, two children are separated from their families. This is their story. War, immigration, family - this book addresses it all.
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@allendeisabel has written a stunning story and the translation is perfection. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to complete her backlist but everything of hers I have read has been amazing.
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“No, we’re not lost. The wind knows my name.”
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✨ Review ✨ The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende; Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Maria Liatis

Wow - Allende does it again!

In this beautiful, thoughtful book, she brings together the stories of a 6-year-old boy (Samuel Adler) who fled Vienna after Kristallnacht on the kindertransport trains to England in 1938 and a blind 7-year-old girl (Anita Diaz) separated from her mother in Arizona in 2019 after crossing the US-Mexico border in their flight from El Salvador.

While I was initially skeptical that anyone could pull off this kind of parallel narrative with the necessary care and compassion, I was impressed by Allende's efforts. Stitching together their stories, she reveals depths about losing family and building family and seeking refuge. She brings in a cast of supporting characters including a social worker and lawyer helping Anita and Leticia, who immigrated to the U.S. when she was young after surviving a massacre where most of her family was killed.

One of the things I was most impressed by was how she drops us into stories so we can see the impact of people who helped these children. While they might just be two children among hundreds of thousands experiencing horrible circumstances, she shows that even efforts to help just one child matter. I also found her narrative of Kristallnacht in Vienna to be really powerful, moving beyond historical narratives where you don't always see the direct human impact.

Finally, I really appreciated how she also wove in femicide and violence against women in Central America to the story, and the ways this reflects on contemporary circumstances. This was another moving book by Allende!

content note: in addition to violence and child separation, this book also continues into the covid era.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 (4.5)
Genre: historical fiction
Setting: Vienna, UK, Arizona, El Salvador, California, etc.
Pub Date: June 6, 2023

Thanks to Ballantine Books, PRHAudio, and #netgalley for advanced e-copies of this book!

Once again I read through an Allende novel and once again, i just feel sad. Sad that people can't see we are still horrible to each other. People sending away, or being separated from their families has happened all throughout history yet we have lived through it recently.
Told in two timelines: we learn that parents are still being separated from their children for political reasons. That is not right for any period in history. AND the author uses amazing, rich, detailed, characters to deliver this important lesson to society without coming off as preachy.
I think this novel could have been even longer, since we have a collection of characters, we need more time to become acquainted with.

I get so excited when I see a new Isabel Allende. My Chilean friend introduced me to her books years ago and I was immediately hooked. She has a magical way of detailing without going overboard.

I did not feel that way with The Wind Knows My Name. It was so unnecessarily wordy. There were several times that I considered DNF. I was extremely surprised. Her views on US politics were also very evident and there were several inaccuracies. It was disappointing.

I love Isabel Allende's books so was happy to receive an eARC from NetGalley. But this one was all over the place, so it was hard to tell what the story was at first or how all the different threads would come together. It almost read like a collection of short stories connected by the themes of being a refugee and separated from one's family. Ultimately an important story but my least favorite Allende book to date.

Thank you Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for this arc.

If you are familiar with Isabel Allende’s writing you know how magically she writes a story. In her new sweeping novel, Allende depicts refugees fleeing from danger and children who find themselves lost in conflicts.

In the beginning, I thought the book contained three different stories. I even thought I was reading short-stories about different people and the dangers and trauma they go through, and the different people they meet. I was confused with all those threads but, as the wonderful writer Mrs. Allende is, all the threads brilliantly come together.

Exploring childhood trauma and relating it to migration, to children leaving behind their torn countries, their loved ones, and everything they know, the author writes a beautifully crafted story. These are not nameless children. They are children who went through so much pain and loss, that the wind knows their names. They are not invisible. Quite the opposite, they are seen, and we know who they are.

Isabel Allende knows firsthand what being displaced means. The Wind Knows My Name is a deeply moving novel although I think the ending felt a bit rushed. Overall, I highly recommend this book. Isabel Allende is an auto-buy author for me. I know I can’t go wrong with her novels.

Isabel Allende never, ever, disappoints. In her epic style, we get two stories decades and miles apart that not only have parallels but also intertwine. Samuel and Anita's stories show us the past we should learn from and somehow keep repeating.