The House on the Lagoon

As indicated in the title, the novel has everything. It has a historical perspective in terms of a women's beginning of her marriage. She weaves us through the love story and the family background's of both her and her husbands origins in Puerto Rico and what brought them there. Right away we are made to see the society that struggles with their legacy of the Spanish colonial occupation all the way up to the American intervention and the effects on the communities of both the poor, the slaves and the elite landowners. We get to experience what it is like to be a slave, the mixed marriages, rapes and abuse. The novel comes full circle as the author brings us back to the beginning when her grandmother warns her she will regret marrying because when you get married you also marry your husband's family background and legacy. Her experiences early on that she regrets outright comes back to haunt her in the end. I couldn't put the book down and have read it several times. A definite worthy book for an historian and for anyone wanting to learn about a people in their search for their identity and voice.

The story in this book takes place in Puerto Rico, where I lived for five years from age 11 to 16. It is beautifully written and very well crafted. It's way more than a "romance" book. You might call it a story of a dynasty - an important (fictional) family. It's also full of the ways of the island itself. My husband and I bought a house in Puerto Rico last year for our upcoming retirement and I read the book while in our new house. I was sad when I finished it, as I always am when I read a good book.

This is a rich, well-written book packed with interesting characters and history. I agree the ending did feel a bit rushed and that it would have been nice to have more of Quintin's perspective in the last part of the book. This book does bring up questions of truth and perspective. Some events were a bit ambiguous, but that was the point. I'm most conflicted about Quintin-was he really responsible for so much violence? At first I wanted to believe he was a regular out of touch middle-aged man, but by the end I thought of him more as a monster. Why didn't Isabel speak out more against the fragmentation of her family?

Wonderfully planned and written. I was so drawn into the story and life that I treasured each page I absorbed.

Rosario Ferré is without doubt a formidable writer with broad literary formation (holding a doctorate in Latin American literature) and impressive versatility in genres: short story, poetry, essay, novelist. She joins that welcomed and exciting cadre of Latina writers who skillfully articulates profound feminist concerns in their respective societies. In THE HOUSE ON THE LAGOON, Ferré presents two of her constantly recurring themes that form the core of her literary trajectory: Puerto Rican reality past and present ... the agonizing socio-psychological consequences produced by the unique historical-political-economic link to the United States; and Latina feminism accompanied by society's ugly prejudicial response. This story offers a highly critical view of Puerto Rican society with a bold reinterpretation of her island's history. As in all her tales and essays (as she herself has revealed) there is a thinly veiled autobiographical reflection. Ferré crafts a stunning literary language that expresses itself via surreal images similar to those that characterized the vanguard writers and visual artists of the opening decades of the twentieth century. In Spanish we call the technique "desdoblamiento" -- the exposition or unfolding of images to narrate the events afflicting her protagonists. It perhaps functions more intensively in the original Spanish. But what results in essence is a mystical fusion of fiction and reality ... magical realism. This is a mesmerizing work by an extremely talented writer and is highly recommended.

Alan Cambeira
Author of AZUCAR! The Story of Sugar (a novel)