[In the following positive review, Hellein finds So Far from God to be a well-written novel full of magic realism and humor.]

Ana Castillo So Far from God creates the illusion of a story told orally, in strong Latin American accents. As in the best tradition of folktales, an informal tone preserves the nuances of spoken narrative and a local flavour is added by a generous sprinkling of Latino-Hispanic words and local lore. Magic is not merely an accoutrement, but it is firmly rooted at the novel's heart and alters the lives of the principal characters; Sofia and her four daughters.

The quarter of daughters, a mixture of the ethereal and the earthly, all Chicana Latin Americans of Spanish descent, are a strange hybrid of Catholic and native spirituality. Sofi's youngest daughter, La Loca, becomes a visionary when, at the age of three, she is wrongly believed dead after an epileptic fit, emerging from her coffin at the funeral service. Thereafter, she develops an allergic reaction to people, whose odour she claims reminds her of her brief visit to hell. Her sister, Caridad, is miraculously restored to her former beauty after an attack leaves her mutilated, and she exchanges her libertine life for that of a hermetic healer. Even Esperanza, the pragmatic journalist, becomes a devotee of mystical native meetings.

Like Laura Esquivel, in Like Water for Chocolate, Castillo mixes stories with recipes—native remedies for such diverse ailments as the evil eye and stress, for Castillo marries beliefs from the Old World and New. Francisco el Penitente, the godson of Dona Felicia, Caridad's friend and mentor, is a “santero”—a man who according to native tradition carves the faces of saints brought from the Old World. Caridad's attack is by a “malogra,” a creature of native myth, and she commits suicide in response to a call from two Mexican goddesses, while La Loca received the news of Esperanza's death from La Lorona, the mythical announcer of death. The surreal effect achieved by such mythology is epitomized by a comment on the death of Fe, Sofi's non-visionary daughter, whose sole peculiarity was to scream for a year after being jilted:

After she died, she did not resurrect as La Loca did at age three. She also did not return ectoplasmically like her tenacious earth bound sister, Esperanza. … And when someone dies that plain dead, it is hard to talk about.

In So Far from God, both life and death are so strange that normality itself becomes an aberration.

Fe's story also shows an awareness of the practical costs of life. She is killed by cancer, developed after using a lethal chemical in a factory, and had earlier suffered a miscarriage because of the same chemical. Her younger sister, La Loca, contracts AIDS. Castillo's women are, for the most part, unfortunate in their choice of men. Esperanza is deserted by her lover, Ruben; Caridad's husband continues to visit his old girlfriend after their marriage; and Fe is jilted by her fiancé, Tom, who, as La Loca divines, sees marriage as being comparable to “having lunch with the devil.” Sofi's husband, the charming but feckless Don Domingo, gambles their house away on his return after twenty years. Domingo is the only man apart from Francisco el Penitente who is sharply drawn. The other men flit vaguely and unreliably in and out of the narrative like migrating swallows. The women's lives mirror the vicissitudes of the Chicana as a whole, lamenting their decline, a lament expressed powerfully in a religious procession at every station of which are spoken not prayers but litanies on the destruction of lives and land. Yet the novel ends on a light note with a description of the “Disneyfication” of the Society of Martyrs and Saints, which is founded by the remarkably resilient Sofia in tribute to her last daughter.

Such an ending is appropriate to the novel, which glimmers throughout with Castillo's exuberant humour. The more magical episodes are infused with glimpses of semi-comic realism, such as the canny opportunism of Domingo who uses his daughters' gift got prophecy to win a fortune at gambling. Even the names are humorous—Francisco dislikes the nickname “Chico” which he was given in Vietnam, because in his native tongue it means a roasted corn or hard kernel. Two of the characters, Maria and Helena, name their cats Artemis, Athena and Xochitl. Occasionally, the humour turns into farce, as when Fe's husband is described as having a genetic tendency to bleat owing to 300 years of ancestral shepherding. Castillo is also wryly ironic at the expense of the Catholic Church, particularly on the reaction of the local priest, Father Jerome, to La Loca's miraculous resurrection. The title itself is ironic, because So Far from God is about faith—in amalgamated Latino beliefs, in Dona Felicia's remedies and in oneself.