SOURCE: A review of The Youngest Doll, in Nation, Vol. 252, No. 17, May 6, 1991, pp. 597–8.

In the following review, Hart compares the narrative modes of The Youngest Doll and Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, highlighting the authors's thematic similarities.

Defiant magic feminism challenges all our conventional notions of time, place, matter and identity in Rosario Ferré's spectacular new book, The Youngest Doll, first published in Spanish in 1976 as Papeles de Pandora and now deftly translated into English primarily by the author herself. Magic realism electro-charged with feminist awareness fuels a constellation of Latin American writers I call the magic feminists-luminaries like Isabel Allende, Luisa Valenzuela and Clarice Lispector, in addition to Ferré. Latin America's male magic realists have long juxtaposed the impossible with the quotidian, so what sets these women apart is their feminist view of what we can and should call real.

A couple of quick comparisons will...