Review by Harry Oulton

City of the Beasts is the first part of an eco-trilogy by Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende, which was translated into English from Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. The novel transports Alex, a spoilt American teenager, to the Amazon rainforest with his eccentric grandmother in search of a mysterious creature known only as “the beast”. If that sounds like a YA rendition of Heart of Darkness then that’s about right, but it’s brilliant. Isabelle Allende’s adult fiction mixes politics with magic realism, and she uses a similar approach in this novel, only here the politics are the need for ‘protection’ of endangered indigenous tribes and the ‘magic’ is Amazonian mysticism and shamanism. The narrative moves very fast as Alex and his new friend Nadia are kidnapped by the indigenous “People of the Mist”, venture deep into the heart of the jungle, resolve the legend of El Dorado, discover their spirit animals and embark on individual quests to acquire the grails they need to fulfil their self-appointed tasks. There is a danger with writing fantastical narratives that every magical element must have a possible explanation, but Allende commits so completely to her world that you are totally embedded. While you absolutely buy into the magical elements, at no stage do you feel she is using them to resolve the plot. There is of course a murderous commercial conspiracy which the children must defeat, but they do it in a conventional way, and the skills they acquire from their “spirit animals” (in Spanish the trilogy is called Memorias del Aguila y del Jaguar or Chronicles of the eagle and the jaguar) allow them to focus and channel their innate strengths, rather than giving them super-natural abilities.

If I have a complaint, it is that Allende clearly had such a great time writing the fantastical elements that she slightly neglected the more everyday characters and made them feel slightly one-dimensional, bordering on cartoony. Alex’s grandmother is tough (her skin is “leathery”) but Alex “knows she loves him”, the pompous anthropologist is ridiculously un-self-aware, and the wealthy man who is helpfully funding bits of the trip turns out to be corrupt and self-interested. However, there are some very good twists, and as I said, Allende is scrupulous about resolving everything conventionally, while never holding back from portraying the fantastical secrets of the jungle as entirely real. Alex and Nadia are reunited in books two and three (Kingdom of the Golden Dragon and Forest of the Pygmies), so if you love City of Beasts, there are two more novels to add to your reading list.

City of the Beasts
Written by Isabel Allende, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
2003, HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780007146376
Reviews: Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian

Harry Oulton (he/him) is the author of three middle grade novels, a book of prompts for writers and three short films, one of which won best fashion short at the Tokyo Shorts Film Festival. Before becoming a writer he worked for the BBC and ITV and has been responsible for over 30 hours of broadcast television. He produced the acclaimed Bad Mother’s Handbook starring Catherine Tate and Robert Pattinson for ITV1, and exec-produced the BAFTA-nominated The Great Train Robbery for BBC1. Harry is in the third year of his creative writing PhD at Goldsmiths. His YA novel is a radical reworking of a Robert Louis Stevenson original and explores adaptation studies as applied to historical fiction and children’s literature.

—

GLLI’s 2024 International YA Literature Month has been curated by Dr Emily Corbett. She is a lecturer in children’s and young adult literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she leads the MA Children’s Literature: Theoretical Approaches to Children’s and Young Adult Literature programme. Her research focuses on the growth and development of YA from literary, publishing, and cultural perspectives. She is also General Editor of The International Journal of Young Adult Literature and was founding Vice President of the YA Studies Association. Her monograph, In Transition: Young Adult Literature and Transgender Representation (2024), is forthcoming with the University Press of Mississippi in June. You can find her contact details on her institutional website and connect with her on Twitter and Instagram via @DrEmilyCorbett.

Opinions expressed in posts on this site are the individual author’s and are not indicative of the views of Global Literature in Libraries Initiative.