SOURCE: “And So Close to the United States,” in Commonweal, Vol. 121, No. 1, January 14, 1994, pp. 37–38.

In the following mixed review, Stavans expresses disappointment with So Far from God, finding Castillo's earlier work to be more original and vastly superior.

The recent renaissance of Latino letters is led by a number of very accomplished women. This, of course, is good news. It has, after all, taken far too long to find Hispanic women a room of their own in the library of world literature. With the exception of Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz, a seventeenth-century Mexican nun who astonished the Spanish-speaking world with her conceptual sonnets and philosophical prose (Octavio Paz wrote a spellbinding biography, SorJuana: Or, The Traps of Faith, [see Commonweal January 27, 1989]), women have rarely been read and discussed by mainstream Latino culture. Rosario Castellanos, Isabel Allende, Elena Poniatowska, and Gabriela Mistral—the latter received the 1945 Nobel...