City of the Beasts (Spanish: La ciudad de las bestias) was published by HarperCollins in 2002 and inaugurated Allende’s trilogy of adventure novels for young adult readers. Fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold travels to the Amazon jungle with his journalist grandmother Kate, who is reporting on an expedition to find a legendary giant creature called the Beast. In the jungle, Alexander encounters Nadia Santos, the daughter of a local guide, and together they discover the People of the Mist — an ancient indigenous civilization hidden deep in the forest.
The novel operates simultaneously as adventure story (the expedition faces natural dangers, hostile creatures, and human villains), ecological parable (the Amazon is threatened by logging, mining, and commercial exploitation), and coming-of-age narrative (Alexander discovers courage, empathy, and respect for indigenous knowledge through his jungle experiences). Allende brings her characteristic warmth and narrative energy to the younger audience without condescending to it.
The People of the Mist represent an alternative to industrial civilization — a society that lives in harmony with nature, possesses spiritual knowledge that modernity has lost, and is threatened with extinction by the same forces of greed and exploitation that Allende has chronicled in her adult novels. Alexander’s choice — to protect the People of the Mist rather than expose them — is the novel’s moral center.
Collecting City of the Beasts
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2002): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $25–$60