ABSTRACT
Isabel Allende is an international bestselling author. In the world of literature, she is deemed “the most widely read woman writer in Spanish in the last half of the twentieth-century” (Zapata, 17). Her much anticipated entry into the young adult book empire began with a trilogy in 2002: City of the Beasts (an adventure story set in the Amazon river basin), Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (2004), which takes the reader to the Himalayan mountains, and Forest of the Pygmies (2005), which plunks her protagonists into the midst of a tropical rain forest in “Darkest Africa.” The main characters are multinational, intergenerational and, in one instance, biracial. Yet this question soon surfaces vis-à-vis Forest of the Pygmies: is it written to engage the diverse adolescent populations in today’s “global village”? Or contrariwise, is it steeped in ridicule and mockery, not only of “Pygmies” and Bantus, but of Africa in general-African cultures, languages, phenotypes?
