SOURCE: “Lush Language: Desert Heat,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 16, 1993, pp. 1, 9.

Barbara Kingsolver is a best-selling novelist and essayist. In the following review, she praises Castillo's So Far from God, finding it to be a well-written and humorous novel that encompasses both parody and social commentary.

So Far from God could be the offspring of a union between One Hundred Years of Solitude and “General Hospital” a sassy, magical, melodramatic love child who won't sit down and—the reader can only hope—will never shut up.

This delightful novel is the third from Ana Castillo, who won an American Book Award for The Mixquiahuala Letters, and like much of her other work it is set in the cultural borderlands of the U.S. Southwest. Castillo's terrain is not the New Mexico that recently had its 15 minutes of fame in trendy galleries, it is the enduring land...