THE WIND KNOWS MY NAME

A novel about all sorts of characters crossing all sorts of borders.

Allende’s latest begins in Vienna on Kristallnacht, when Samuel Adler’s father is beaten so badly he eventually dies from his injuries. But Samuel doesn’t find that out until years have passed: After Samuel’s mother places him on a Kindertransport train to England, he loses touch with both parents. Then Allende jumps to the United States, where Leticia Cordero has ended up (illegally) after narrowly surviving the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. In alternating chapters, Allende also describes Anita Díaz, a 7-year-old girl separated from her mother in a detention facility after crossing illegally into Arizona; Selena, a social worker trying to help Anita; and Frank, a hotshot lawyer who joins Anita’s case because he has the hots for Selena. Eventually—predictably—all these storylines intersect. Unfortunately, the two-dimensional characters never come to life. Neither does their dialogue, which is overstuffed with exposition. Allende uses her characters shamelessly as political mouthpieces. Hapless Frank, for example, complains: “But we can’t just open the floodgates and let millions of immigrants and refugees in. What’s the solution, Selena?” Selena, as you can imagine, tells him. This tactic appears throughout the book, which leans heavily on blatant exposition and draws heavy-handed parallels between Hitler’s Europe and Trump’s America. “Hitler used terror as a political tactic,” Allende writes, “taking advantage of discontent over economic woes.” This habit might have been more tolerable if Allende’s conclusions weren’t so trite. On Kristallnacht, she writes, a “sense of misfortune hung in the air.” There is little here that is original and even less that is genuinely moving.

Allende is too caught up in drawing historical and political parallels to imbue her characters with life.