SOURCE: “Constructing and Reconstructing,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. XIII, No. 5, February, 1996, p. 5.

In the following review of The House on the Lagoon, Grossman discusses the plot, major characters, and underlying message of the novel, concluding that “The House on the Lagoon gives us a performance of great accomplishment and wit, and the sense of a world held in measured but deeply affectionate memory.”

Rosario Ferré belongs in the company of those truly bilingual writers (Isak Dinesen was one such, Vladimir Nabokov another) whose irrepressible delight in the play of eloquence and style makes it seem that one language is never enough. In her previous volume of stories, The Youngest Doll, and now in The House on the Lagoon, Ferré has evoked both literary meaning and pleasure from the Puerto Rican predicament of a Latino culture under American domination. Her work, along with that of Julia Alvarez...