SOURCE: Roses, Lorraine Elena. “A Wandering Magician.” Women's Review of Books 10, nos. 10–11 (July 1993): 35–36.

In the following favorable review of A Forbidden Passion, Roses compares Peri Rossi with the Latin-American writers Isabel Allende and Luisa Valenzuela.

If you aren't already a devotee of magical realism, a literary mode from Latin America whose hallmarks are levitating women, dissolving gypsies, time warps, invisible house guests and other pregnant inversions of fantasy and reality, let Cristina Peri Rossi initiate you into its riches. In her eerie world, a lone fallen angel exists unnoticed amid the grinding anomie and environmental blight of a big city until a homeless woman starts a street-corner conversation with him. The marginality of this middle-aged woman is like the angel's—the two share an invisibility that allows them to become confidantes. While they are speaking, the woman is whisked away by security forces; the angel is left to...