SOURCE: “Battling with Magic,” in Washington Post, May 31, 1993, p. D6.

In the following mixed review, Polk gives a positive assessment of So Far from God's plot, but finds the magical-realism format to be overused and unoriginal.

Have we had enough of the magical yet? Is there still room on the world's bookshelves for another Hispanic novel set in a dusty town where life and death coexist, and where the marvelous is commonplace?

The trouble with So Far from God, no matter how frequently engaging and well crafted it may be—and it is both—is that it strikes too many familiar chords. From the opening, when Sofi's 3-year-old daughter suffers a seizure and dies only to rise up at her own funeral and fly to the roof of the church in the impoverished New Mexican hamlet of Tome, we can hear the echoes.

That's a shame because...