Grace Aguilar (1816–1847)

Aguilar’s style and even sentence structure seemed stilted and unnatural. The dialogue in particular failed to portray actual human speech, rather it sounded like so many set pieces.
"The Perez Family" and "The Escape" both came across as too good to be true. The Perez Family especially had far too much of the predictability of problems in sit-coms which reliably are solved neatly with every one emerging a little bit wiser as the entire extended family draws closer together. When combined with the forced dialogue mentioned above, these morality melodramas cloy rather than entertain or instruct.
In both "The Escape" and "The Perez Family", I could not help being reminded of Voltaire’s Candide. These works may be seen as anti-Candide in that The Es-cape and Candide both prominently feature the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 yet with wildly different, completely opposite results. In addition, both show the con-ditions of Christians and Jews in Portugal at the time. Moreover, Candide, Cu-negonde and the rest of the gang from Westphalia find themselves always doing the right things but forever being punished by irrational and impersonal quirks of happenstance, while the Aguilar’s characters find themselves in the hands of a loving and personal deity who frequently and bounteously repays their love and loyalty with material compensation. I feel sure Aguilar’s writings would have made Voltaire’s head spin.… (mais)