SOURCE: Caldwell, Gail. “El Norte, the Hard Way.” Boston Globe (22 September 2002): D6.

In the following review, Caldwell asserts that Cisneros's Caramelo is lacking in narrative structure, cohesiveness, and momentum, and ultimately fails as a novel.

The Mexico evoked in Sandra Cisneros's prose is scarcely the global hodgepodge of a modern Mexico-for-export—that place of late where norteamericanos queue up for burritos under hegemony's golden arches. Instead it's the cloistered country of a few decades ago, where the zocalo, or town square, still exudes the music and mayhem of an entire culture. Rendered with delicate precision in her 1991 story collection, Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros's is a province of the senses: the smells of tamale vendors, the brilliant colors of scarlet and turquoise houses, the waves of white crosses on a steep hillside's makeshift cemetery. It's a place lit with the flicker of Virgine de Guadalupe candles and darkened by...