The influence of magical realism, a literary style common in Latin America in which fantastic or dreamlike events happen alongside more conventionally realistic ones, is clearly felt in The Agüero Sisters. Garcia mentions a man who was hit by lightning and reads everything backward, and a woman who swallows silver dust to stop hallucinating. Fantastic events are, as Michiko Kakutani said in a 1997 New York Times review, "a symptom both of the natural world's surpassing strangeness and the bizarre predicaments the human species likes to invent for itself." Some of the events Kakutani cited are the man who's saved from his angry workers by a flock of tree ducks, the man who's killed in a hurricane by "a high velocity avocado," and the fact that Reina and Constancia's grandmother dies in a pig stampede.

Garcia herself believes that second-generation Cuban immigrants are in a...