Have we had enough of the magical yet? Is there still room on the world's bookshelves for another Hispanic novel set in a dusty town where life and death coexist, and where the marvelous is commonplace?

The trouble with So Far from God, no matter how frequently engaging and well crafted it may be—and it is both—is that it strikes too many familiar chords. From the opening, when Sofi's 3-year-old daughter suffers a seizure and dies only to rise up at her own funeral and fly to the roof of the church in the impoverished New Mexican hamlet of Tome, we can hear the echoes.

That's a shame because Ana Castillo, a poet and author of a fine epistolary novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, here assembles a lively cast of characters and situations and unleashes them on a solid plot. By the end of the novel, we know these people.

After the youngest returns from her excursion to the nether world with the announcement that she has been sent back to pray for Tome and its citizens, she withdraws from human contact (“only her mother and the animals were ever unconditionally allowed to touch her”) and begins routinely performing miracles of the most unexpected sort. From then on the girl is known as Loca, though with considerable respect.

Her three sisters also undergo peculiar transformations. Caridad wins and then loses her high school sweetheart, has several pregnancies and several abortions, and is finally mangled and left for dead by an unknown assailant. After being restored to her former beauty by one of Loca's casual wonders (“I prayed real hard”), she likewise distances herself from affairs of human commerce.

While her sister's unworldly experience binds her to home, Caridad follows her “Holy Restoration” by striking out on her own—actually, she's accompanied by a horse—and settles into a trailer park near Albuquerque. There, under the guidance of Felicia, the ancient manager of the place, she begins to master the healing arts, develops second sight and lives a spiritual life.

At first Fe, Sofi's third daughter, seems headed for a conventional destiny. She works at a bank, has a boyfriend and does not understand how her mother and sisters can be “so self-defeating, so unambitious.” Suddenly, just before their wedding, Tom backs out and Fe breaks down. For weeks on end, she fills every waking moment with screams until the noise becomes such a part of life's normal background that not even the animals bother to stir.

The eldest, Esperanza, goes to college, falls in and out of love with Ruben, a sort of new age Chicano (they spend quality time in sweat lodges), becomes a news reporter on local TV and then a network correspondent. What is strange about this otherwise uplifting tale of one woman's rise from poverty is that there seems no driving ambition behind it.

Without particularly wanting to, Esperanza becomes the first of her family to get an education and leave Tome. Neither she nor anyone else wonders much about this easy climb from her origins, just as no one wonders that none of the others shares her inclinations. It's just the way things are.

At the center of this world of extraordinary women is their extraordinary mother. Sofi endures the hurly-burly of her daughters' bizarre lives with considerable aplomb; nor is she much shaken by the appearances and disappearances of her husband, a compulsive gambler, who shows up to raid the family coffers when in need of a new stake. Defeated, she stands taller at the end, when her daughters have departed for various spiritual planes and her husband has deserted her yet again, than at the beginning. Her strength is at the heart of Castillo's novel.

In many ways, So Far from God is a hymn to the endurance of women, both physical and spiritual. Sofi and her daughters do continual battle against the incursions of men who haven't a clue; that they come out whole at the end (which is not to say alive and well, exactly) is a singular tribute to their clear-sighted perseverance.

The author tells an important story and she tells it with inventiveness and verve. If she had told it in a more original voice, the result would be memorable.