I know I cheated with this one; I read it in English, when I really should have tried it in Spanish. It's just I usually read on the train and it's really frustrating to only get through 10 pages per journey. Plus, Maya's Notebook, written from the perspective of a nineteen-year-old American girl, is the kind of thing that would "really" be written in English anyway, at least if it were real and not a novel by Isabel Allende. Which it obviously isn't, with a tone less lyrical but otherwise similar to Allende's other novels; not really the style an American teenager would go for in their personal journal. So, I don't know which language would have been better, but I did read it in English, so there we are.

Overall I liked this novel, but I agree with some of the criticisms others gave made of it — the plot is chaotic, unbelievable. The novel begins when Maya has to flee powerful enemies in the United States and ends up hiding out on an isolated island of Chiloé with an old friend of her grandma's. From that point on, there are two timelines — Maya writes about her experiences in Chiloé, and intersperses them with sections on her life in the US, all the events that culminated in her fleeing.

Dividing the book into quarters, they all have different vibes, and there are different things to say about them. The first quarter, like those of a lot of Allende books, is pretty slow. In the second, things get pretty intense and exciting, aside from the Chiloé parts which continue not to be. In the third quarter, the US timeline gets seriously depressing, which Allende counterbalances (or tries to) by introducing a romance subplot in Chiloé, but this doesn't work that well. Then in the last quarter, everything is chaotic and so many different scattered subplots get resolved and then there are some random tangents that don't seem to advance any subplots and it's all a mess. I suppose it did resolve anything (I can't think of any open ends, although I'm not really the best at that anyway)… but it was just very messy.

Suddenly revealing that Manuel Arias was Maya's real grandfather, not Felipe Vidal, was completely out of the blue – I don't believe this had been hinted at, or set up in any real way. The extended flashback to Maya's aborted stay in Denmark with her mother also seemed out-of-place, considering this mother barely figured into the story at all. Things like that gave it its chaotic feel.

In some ways I feel like this novel tried to cover too much. Or maybe not so much that, but it didn't blend everything it was trying to discuss very well. Primarily, it's about an American teenager who felt lost after her (step-)grandfather's death, got mixed up in drugs and eventually organised crime, and has to go into hiding and recover. The subplot about Manuel being persecuted by the Pinochet regime felt tacked on. Mostly because that entire subplot, minus Manuel having some nightmares that I didn't necessarily expect to be explained – thinking "trauma from the dictatorship" explained it enough – happened in the last quarter of the book. It just didn't feel that well incorporated.

The other thing about this novel is that parts of it are very brutal. It's graphic in its depictions of drug-related violence and addiction, and the way Pinochet's regime tortured people, but there's also a very brutal rape scene at one point (although on that note, kudos to Allende for depicting it purely as violence without trying to make it "sexy" or "scintillating" at all). So if you have a low tolerance for these kinds of scenes or topics, this is not a great book for you.

In retrospect, another thing this book did well was describing some of the social problems of small-town southern Chile – the legacy of the dictatorship, lack of employment, domestic violence, molestation even. But it did this while retaining a real affection for the society and people it talked about. (Well I mean, most of the people…) It was sort of hard to notice this while I was reading because the parts of the book set in the US were always more action-packed than the parts set in Chile, so they captured more of my attention, but that element is there.

Overall I liked it, and it's getting three stars, but man it was chaotic.