SOURCE: Upchurch, Michael. “What's Cooking on Mindanao?” New York Times Book Review (5 October 2003): 13.

In the following review, Upchurch argues that Dream Jungle is Hagedorn's “best book since Dogeaters,” praising the author's skillful evocation of the Philippines in the 1970s.

A narrative collage hopscotching from year to year, from place to place and from one point of view to another: that's what Jessica Hagedorn offers in her intricate new novel, which boldly links a Manila millionaire's “discovery” of a Stone Age tribe on Mindanao with a filmed re-creation of the Vietnam War on that same guerrilla-plagued island six years later.

Dream Jungle scrupulously documents its chosen time and place: the Marcos-controlled Philippines of the 1970's. But it also, more ambitiously, engages with the unreliability of the realities it depicts.

Could this whole Stone Age tribe business (based on the controversy surrounding the “gentle” Tasaday) be a fraud? Will the...