SOURCE: “Blood of the Conquistadors,” in New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1995, p. 28.

In the following review, Ruta comments on the style, structure, and characterization of The House on the Lagoon.

“We have not given your island a single thought, and I have no information whatsoever on the place,” Teddy Roosevelt reportedly told a Puerto Rican patriot on the eve of the Spanish-American War. “I've never even known a Puerto Rican,” Stephen Sondheim protested when Leonard Bernstein asked him to collaborate on West Side Story, half a century and millions of immigrants later.

Our ignorance of the island we annexed in 1898 knows no bounds, as Rosario Ferré, Puerto Rico's leading writer, is well aware. The House on the Lagoon, her first novel written in English, may well change that. The story of the affluent and lethally snobbish Mendizabal clan begins on July 4, 1917, when Puerto Ricans were granted American...