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Eccentric Neighborhoods is a an attempt to lay bare the psychological conflicts that determine the relationships between mothers and daughters and the story of Puerto Rico's transformation, from the beginning of the century, into a spearhead of the Caribbean.

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Library Journal Review

Elvira loves her daddy, the man who bravely remade Puerto Rico, but she's got to come to terms with her long-dead mother. From the author of The House on the Lagoon (LJ 8/95), a National Book Award nominee. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

With humor, nostalgia and fateful irony, Puerto Rican novelist Ferré (The House on the Lagoon was an NBA finalist) breathes life into the story of two prominent Puerto Rican families living in the first half of the century during the sugarcane aristocracy's last days. In what often amounts to an imaginary family portrait gallery, narrator Elvira Vernet describes three generations of her forbears: on her mother's side, landed gentry of the central Plata; on her father's side, powerful, politically ambitious builders who flourished during the 1940s when the U.S began to pour federal money into housing and municipal projects. Although the island's recent political history (including visits by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt) is engagingly related, love and family politics are Ferré's subjects, and the heart of the novel is its female characters‘especially the budding feminist Elvira and her angry, intelligent mother, Clarissa, frustrated because her education was intended only to make her a good wife. Elvira marries to escape her mother's influence and competition for her father's love, only to find herself bound to an equally traditional man who, with her mother's approval, stifles her spirit. Although Ferré spends too much of the middle of the novel introducing new characters and subplots, she prunes the sprawl in the final section, which focuses on Elvira's love-hate relationship with her family's past. This rich saga is artfully told, sprinkled with bits of pure poetry and carefully shaped by Ferré's sharp prose. Author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

This rich, multigenerational saga of two families follows the course of twentieth-century Puerto Rico and establishes Ferreas a leading Latin American storyteller in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Elvira Vernet gathers and recounts stories of the lives and loves of her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents and creates her own history as well. The marriage of Elvira's parents, Clarissa Rivas de Santillana and Aurelio Vernet, joins clans whose wealth is made in agriculture and industry, respectively. Though fortunes rise and fall as the sugar market falters and construction booms, members of the two families maintain their lives of privilege; "I wonder what the middle class is doing now," is one uncle's refrain. There is a minimal plot structured around Elvira's stormy relationship with her mother, but the strength of this novel is in Ferre's finely wrought short chapters and the overall tapestry they create, with moods alternately funny, touching, lusty, and tragic, and with an underlying sensuousness. (Reviewed December 15, 1997)0374146381Michele Leber

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Rosario Josefina Ferré was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico on September 28, 1938. She received a bachelor's degree in English literature from Manhattanville College, a master's degree in literature from the University of Puerto Rico, and a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from the University of Maryland. She was a professor of Latin American literature at several universities including the University of California, Rutgers University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Puerto Rico.

She was a novelist, poet, essayist, and children's book author. She was the editor of the literary magazine Loading and Unloading Zone as well as a newspaper columnist and critic. She wrote several books in Spanish and English including The House on the Lagoon, Eccentric Neighborhoods, and Sweet Diamond Dust: And Other Stories. She died on February 18, 2016 at the age of 77.

(Bowker Author Biography)