Mr. Donoso's three long short stories [collected in Sacred Families] are located in and about Barcelona, but his characters are internationally familiar. They belong to that artistic intelligentsia whose members are never as talented or as brilliant as they like to believe. They are, in short, prosperous phonies busily deceiving themselves and each other, and their lives are a mixture of pose and dream. Mr. Donoso's system in these tales is to carry the pose, or the dream, or both into literal action which necessarily becomes bizarre fantasy…. [These are] amusing stories, clever, malicious, and provocative.

Phoebe-Lou Adams, in a review of "Sacred Families," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 240, No. 3, September, 1977, p. 96.