In this brief review, Ilan Stavans describes Ana Castillo's So Far From God as a novel that attempts to be both a parody of well-known Spanish-speaking soap operas and a social satire but unfortunately fails to find a balance between these perspectives.

The recent renaissance of Latino letters is led by a number of very accomplished women. This, of course, is good news. It has, after all, taken far too long to find Hispanic women a room of their own in the library of world literature. With the exception of Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz, a seventeenth-century Mexican nun who astonished the Spanish-speaking world with her conceptual sonnets and philosophical prose (Octavio Paz wrote a spellbinding biogra phy, Sor Juana Or, The Traps of Faith, [see Commonweal, January 27, 1989]), women have rarely been read and discussed by mainstream Latino culture. Rosario Castellanos, Isabel Allende, Elena Poniatowska, and...