SOURCE: Review of Dream Jungle, by Jessica Hagedorn. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 31 (4 August 2003): 53.

In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of Dream Jungle, calling the novel “[barbed and alluring.”]

Barbed and alluring, [Dream Jungle,] this third novel by Hagedorn (Dogeaters; The Gangster of Love) revolves around the purported discovery of a Stone Age “lost tribe” in the Philippines, and deftly explores late 20th-century Filipino cultural identity. Led to the caved-welling Taobo by an enterprising local in 1971, mestizo politician Zamora López de Legazpi is as contented as a “conquistador without an army” can be. At around the same time, 10-year-old Rizalina, the sole survivor of a shipwreck in which her brutal father and twin brothers were killed, comes to live with her mother, who serves as loyal cook to Zamora at his grandiose Manila palace. A model student with an inquisitive mind, Lina is briefly...