Reviews of The House of the Spirits have often focused on comparisons between Allende's first novel and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Despite the similarities, Allende's novel offers some important distinctions and contains strengths that set the work apart from novels written by other Latin-American writers. In a review of The House of the Spirits for The Christian Science Monitor, Marjorie Agosin declares that Allende's novel "captivates and holds the reader throughout its 400 pages." Agosin agrees that the critical acclaim of readers and critics that greeted the publication of Allende's novel is richly deserved. Calling The House of the Spirits "a moving and powerful book," Agosin argues that the book is far more than a novel. Instead, according to Agosin, it is "a double text." This is because Allende's novel incorporates two different goals: "On one level it is...