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Description
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels
The beloved feminist classic of Chicano literature that "could be the offspring of a union between One Hundred Years of Solitude and General Hospital: a sassy, magical, melodramatic love child who won’t sit down—and the reader can hope—will never shut up…As readable as a teen-aged sister’s secret diary—and as impossible to resist" (Barbara Kingsolver, Los Angeles Times Book Review).
"Wacky, wild, y bien funny." —Sandra Cisneros, author of The House of Mango Street and Women Hollering Creek
"Castillo is una storyteller de primera…So Far from God is the novel that wasn’t there before but which I’d been missing.” —Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
In Tome, a small, seemingly sleepy New Mexico hamlet, Sofia and her four fated daughters reveal a world of marvels where the comic and horrific, past and present, real and fantastic coexist and collide.
Over two crowded decades, Sofia tries to hold things together following the disappearance of her husband, Domingo, he of the Clark Gable mustache and the uncontrollable gambling habit. Adventurous Esperanza, Chicana campus radical turned television news reporter, travels farthest from home only to be reeled back in spirit. Beautiful Caridad, a nurse who dulls the pain of being jilted with nightly bouts of alcohol and anonymous sex finally finds love again—and a sharp drop off a tall cliff. Practical Fe, dutiful bank worker who wishes more than anything for stability, upon being dumped by her fiancé, lets out a year-long primal scream. And mysterious La Loca, dies (maybe?) and is resurrected at age three, leaving her both attuned to higher spiritual frequencies and allergic to human touch.
Exuberant and powerful, funny and profound, So Far from God is “a hymn to the endurance of women, both physical and spiritual” (Washington Post Book World).
About the Author
Ana Castillo is a celebrated and distinguished poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator, and independent scholar.
Praise For…
Exuberant and slangy...a chili mix of the conversational and poetic...haunting...profound...powerful.
— Boston Globe
History may one day proclaim So Far from God the breakthrough novel about Chicano life that Ana Castillo…was born to write…Compulsively readable, lilting, and profound…A teaching story that delights as much as it instructs, bringing us memorable characters whose lives stay with us long after the book’s end.
— San Francisco Chronicle
The author tells an important story and she tells it with inventiveness and verve…So Far from God is a hymn to the endurance of women, both physical and spiritual.
— Washington Post Book World
Ana Castillo has gone and done what I always wanted to do—written a Chicana telenovela—a novel roaring down Interstate 25 at one hundred and fifteen miles an hour with an almanac of Chicanoismo—saints, martyrs, T.V. mystics, home remedies, little miracles, dichos, myths, gossip, recipes-fluttering from the fender like a flag. Wacky, wild, y bien funny. Dale gas, girl!
— Sandra Cisneros, author of The House of Mango Street and Women Hollering Creek
Ana Castillo is una storyteller de primera…Her voice is distinctive-zany, knowing, rhythmic, with its very own mix of Latino–U.S. of A. cadences…able to hold our attention from the first to last page of this packed, picaresque novel. So Far from God is the novel that wasn’t there before but which I’d been missing. Bravo, Ana!
— Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Exciting and wonderful! I gave it to my mother, my sister, my daughter, my whole family. Anybody who's ever been the daughter of a mother will appreciate this book.
— Ntozake Shange, author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf
Ana Castillo is immensely insightful in every sense of the word…A writer with enormous integrity, with common sense and lyric sense, yet one who passes back and forth between more than one psychic world…and is able to bring back what she has seen and sensed into the land of her intense and beautifully crafted writing.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run with the Wolves
While reading, you may get an eerie feeling that you are 12 years old and back in your grandmother's kitchen smelling all those wonderful smells and hearing all her curious stories.
— Hispanic News
Castillo is simply dazzling, tossing off miracles, scathing social commentary, and smart-ass humor as easily and naturally as shaking water from a mane of wet hair.
— Booklist