"Tell me a story," Rolfe Carle asks of his lover Eva Luna. "Tell me a story you have never told anyone." And so our modern-day Sheherezade spins twenty-three tales over twenty-three nights now collected into "The Stories of Eva Luna," where storyteller, Isabel Allende, evokes powerful emotions in her readers through themes of love, death, pride, strength, and courage.
             Isabel Allende, the author of The Stories of Eva Luna, writes in a simple, yet extremely descriptive way, giving her stories an almost music-like resonance and letting the reader feel like they are actually right there next to the action, as when, in Ester Lucero 'they bore her away on an improvised stretcher, bleeding like a stuck pig, her eyes wide with terror.' (ESTER LUCERO, PG. 1).
             Allende's powerful descriptions in Ester Lucero, as well as two other short stories, And of Clay Are We Created and The Judge's Wife are wonderfully rich, allowing the reader to visualize places, identify with events and become emotionally attached to characters, as we do when we are told of Azucena stuck in a mudslide in And of Clay Are We Created, with 'her dark face, her large desolate eyes, the plastered-down tangle of hair.'. (AND OF CLAY, PG. 2)
             Critics have dubbed Allende's descriptive power as being 'distinctive, powerful and haunting' (ELAINE KENDALL, LOS ANGELES TIMES - DECEMBER 28, 1990), and 'able to turn the ordinary into magic and the magical into everyday life'. (GILLIAN STEWARD, THE CALGARY HERALD - JANUARY 19, 1991) Allende is one of the most widely recognized authors to use what is known as 'magic realism', which she says is 'based around that dream-like quality that memories have. It's misty, it's foggy. You don't know what's real and what's fantasy.'
             Magic realism is the ability to mix fantasy with realistic events and make them seem like they belong together. It is the description of 'a subterranean sob rocking the cotton fields' (AND OF CLAY, P...