How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is a debut novel told in reverse chronological order across fifteen interlinked chapters that span thirty years in the lives of the four Garcia sisters. The Garcias are a wealthy upper class family in the Dominican Republic until their father's involvement in a plot against the dictator Rafael Trujillo forces them to flee to a small apartment in the Bronx in the early 1960s. Carla, Sandi, Yolanda, and Sofia grow up American, with American boyfriends, American slang, and American problems, even as their parents try to police them with the conventions of the Caribbean upper class they have left behind. Alvarez moves the book backward in time, beginning with the sisters as adults visiting the island and ending with their childhood at the family compound, a structure that lets the reader feel how each Americanized woman was once a privileged little girl in another country. The novel was groundbreaking in 1991 for its portrait of Latina immigrant identity.
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Four sisters and their parents flee a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and land in New York. The novel runs backward, from their American adulthoods to the island childhood they were pulled out of.
Partly. Julia Alvarez has said the novel draws on her own family's experience emigrating from the Dominican Republic to the United States. The Garcia family's broad arc echoes her own, but the specific events are fictional.
Yes. The novel moves backward in time, opening with the Garcia sisters as adults in 1989 and ending with their early childhood in the Dominican Republic. The structure is one of the book's most discussed features.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents was written by Julia Alvarez, published in 1992 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is a standalone novel by Julia Alvarez, not part of a series.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
