After all, just because there had been a time way back when, when some fregados all full of themselves went out of their way to prove that none among them had the potential of being a mother, did it mean that there had to come a time when someone would be made to prove that she did?

Further praise for So Far from God

“So Far from God 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 only hope—will never shut up. … As readable as a teen-aged sister’s secret diary—and as impossible to resist.”

—Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times Book Review

“Goddamn! 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 on 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

“Haunting … surreal … lyrical, crazy, and wise … steeped in pungent folklore, with a flavor like Hieronymous Bosch meets Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera…. It speaks in a totally original voice.”

—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War

“Castillo brings a warm, sometimes biting feminist consciousness to the wondrous, tragic, and engaging lives of a New Mexico mother and her four fated daughters …. Storytelling skills and humor allow Castillo to integrate and deliver folklore and political material with unabashed directness and disarming charm.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“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 … wrenching … you will always pick up this book again because it calls to you until you finish it.”

—Hispanic News

“Raucous, realistic, yet mystical … memorable characters, radical politics, and storytelling skill that shimmers on the page.”

—MS

“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