Marin-based novelist Isabel Allende was already an émigré and mother of two when she began spinning tales in her late 30s. Her first book, The House of the Spirits (1982), is based on a childhood in Chile surrounded by fierce personalities, real and imagined, and this sense of magical realism still characterizes much of her fiction. She didn’t tackle her own past directly until her memoir Paula (1994), written, Allende explains, as a self-preservation tactic during her daughter’s fatal illness. Now Allende returns to personal history—although her new book, also addressed to Paula, reads less as a cry of despair and more as a love letter to her family, which has faced countless tragedies with seemingly inexhaustible strength. There’s death, divorce, infertility; Allende’s son loses his wife to his stepbrother’s girlfriend; her addict stepdaughter disappears. It all sounds like too much to handle, and it might be, except for occasional lighthearted moments that relieve the parade of suffering. Like any mother, Allende wears rose-colored glasses: Her family’s flaws are few and often beyond their control. But the charming frankness of her writing keeps you in their corner. While the book isn’t magical enough to serve as an introduction to Allende the novelist, it is a brave and engaging look at Allende the matriarch. B+ (HarperCollins)