Manlio Argueta's most lyrical novel to date, A PLACE CALLED MILAGRO DE LA PAZ continues de saga of life among the common people in El Salvador begun with ONE DAY OF LIFE. Examining the legacy of civil strife in the lives of a Salvadoran family, it tells the story of the courage and strength of a single mother and her daughter, who have to overcome the trauma of the murder of the eldest daughter and survive in an atmosphere of bitter poverty and repression. The book is filled, however, with magical, lyric moments of love and compassion, strangely illuminated by the figure of a young girl with butterflies in her hair who suddenly appears and adopts the family. This astonishing tour-de-force exemplifies the best in magic realism.

The Washington Post called Argueta's A PLACE CALLED MILAGRO DE LA PAZ an "exquisitely crafted novel" and considered it "a veritable hymn to these resilient, uncomplaining women." Critic Beatriz Terrazas wrote in Dallas Morning News: "It takes a master to turn a story of pain and tragedy into a thing of beauty. But then Manlio Argueta is a proven master of words." Philip Herter commented in The St. Petersburg Times that A PLACE CALLED MILAGRO DE LA PAZ "charms like a fairytale but has the moral force of an indictment." Nick Owchar from The Los Angeles Times noted that Argueta's novel "assures us that from the ashes of tragedy, the human spirit will rise like a legendary bird." Other words of praise appeared in Publishers Weekly, Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, World Literature Today, and The British Bulletin of Publications.

The book is a very intellectual and sensitive portrayal of a family of three women who must deal with very adverse conditions and who have to make a living with very few means. It is at once serious and yet it allows for human dignity and inner strenght in the characters. A very good look at the strenghts of women in a very unfavorable setting.

This is an excellent story, well told with colorful illustrations. It opens children's eyes to compassion, offering a story of hope and reconciliation. Excellent for children and for adults, too - it went over well in a class in Hispanic culture at Wofford College.

A serious study of the Cold War generally entails the bitter ideological struggle of two superpowers trying to exert their spheres of influence over nearby countries. In this geopolitical struggle we are rarely confronted with the idea of military confrontation, with the great exception being the Cuban missile crisis. More often than not Central America has played a marginal role in our understanding of Cold War tensions. Central America makes an interesting case study because it makes a strong case for the development of Latin America as a geopolitical reserve of the United States, in the same way that the Soviet Union had its satellite states. The conflict of democracy versus socialism took the center stage in the days following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. More importantly, the 1979 triumph of the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional [FSLN] in Nicaragua paved the way for a conflict in neighboring El Salvador which would be anything but ideological. In this context, Manlio Argueta, a renowned Salvadorian writer took upon himself the task of viewing the Salvadorian civil war from the eyes of those who lived it. In One Day of Life, Argueta paints a gruesome picture of the harsh realities of the Cold War beyond those painted by White House speech writers. Argueta attempts to place the cold war in real terms, in a way that is chillingly real and shocking.
Argueta's One Day of Life takes place in a reality which is often obscured behind the larger context of a Soviet/American ideological struggle. Argueta's work is crucial to understanding the conflict of a country which was prominent in the media during the 1980's and which at the time was feared to be the next Vietnam. Written in 1980, Argueta's work is fictional, much like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but imbued with vivid and often harrowing details of the conditions that afflicted the Salvadorian people for 12 years. For the outsider, the Salvadorian civil war was a vicious conflict which resulted in the deaths of approximately 61,000 civilians, while anywhere from 750,000 to over a million Salvadorians migrated to the United States. While the numbers are significant, Argueta takes us into the minds of the Salvadorian psyche by looking across the social strata to peasants, insurgents, national guardsmen, and all those caught by uncertainty.

This was my introduction to El Salvador and I am glad I choose this book. The writing was unique and kept me interested throughout. I am even more interested now about the struggles of the poor in El Salvador during the civil war and even today.

To start off, "One Day of Life" is a marvelous book. A very shocking peice of truth in the history of El Salvador. The Book is peiced together by the stories of the people in a small town in El Salvador. Stories put as one to reveal the tradegies and poverty in Central American towns, where the people do not know their own rights as human beings. The time the story is set in, is 1936. A pre-war time where communism was being beaten and people were being beaten just as well for beliefs they might not have had. IF you wish to indulge yourself in a great book that shows the truth through the eyes of the poverty born world then this is the book for you. I highley reccomend you read this.