SOURCE: A review of The House on the Lagoon, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring, 1996, p. 168.

In the following review, Friedman unfavorably compares The House on the Lagoon with Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits.

The House on the Lagoon is an attempt at a Puerto Rican House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende's 1982 novel. Indeed, the narrator's name is Isabel. Set in Ponce and San Jose, the novel follows six generations of two families from the business aristocracy of Puerto Rico and even provides the reader with a family tree. The narrator's manuscript, which she keeps hidden, is discovered by her husband Quintin who then provides the novel with some self-reflexiveness. He comments on Isabel's style and her truthfulness, offers other versions of the events, and rationalizes the misdeeds of his relatives as related in the manuscript. But because his critiques are not given much...