I’m a huge fan of everything “Zorro.” I love Antonio Banderas, the costumes, sword fights, fighting for justice and the romance. So it’s little surprise that I would enjoy “Zorro” by Isabel Allende.

I expected the book to be about Anthony Hopkins’ character in “The Mask of Zorro,” and I was right to an extent. Hopkins does play Don Diego de la Vega, which the book focuses on, but the book is about how Zorro came to be. The movie shows Hopkins as Zorro for five minutes until he gets captured.

The book is about the first 20 years of Diego de la Vega’s life. Allende wants to show the readers and lovers of Zorro how de la Vega was shaped and was able to come up with the character Zorro. It’s split into five different parts. The first section shows the different backgrounds of Diego’s parents. His dad is a gentleman and his mother is a wild Native American.

The second part goes into great detail about Diego’s childhood. Not only is he being raised to take over his father’s place, but also his mother is teaching him the laws and ideas of her tribe. He is raised with his “milk brother,” and they have a connection for life.

The third and fourth section takes young Diego and his brother to and out of Spain. There, Diego learns about justice. This is where he forms his second identity Zorro. He thinks he falls in love with a young girl, but she steadily refuses him throughout the novel. The fifth section is Diego’s life once he returns to California.

It took awhile for me to get into this book. I don’t want to say it was boring, but it was drug out and dull. Once Diego is born, it picks up speed tremendously. The book is full of vivacious, colorful characters that made reading it much more interesting. The secondary characters were given justice. A lot of books don’t go into detail with secondary characters, but Allende did.

However, I didn’t like the ending. Everyone likes a happy ending, but this book sort of just ends. The epilogue is set in the future, and poor Diego hasn’t found real, true love yet, which doesn’t correspond with the movie.

The movie wasn’t based on this book. Allende just wanted to give a background of how the infamous character of Zorro was created. Once you get passed to first 40 pages, this book is hard to put down. I recommend it for readers who like adventure.