OTHER BOOKS

by Julia Alvarez

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith:
While visiting her relatives in the Dominican Republic, Yolanda reflects: "She and her sisters have led such turbulent lives - so many husbands, homes, jobs, wrong turns among them. But look at her cousins, women with households and authority in their voices. Let this turn out to be my home." Yolanda left this home in the early 1960s when, for political reasons, her parents immigrated to the United States with their four young daughters. Her parents made sure Yolanda and her sisters went to prep school to meet the "right kind" of Americans and in time, when the political climate cooled down in the Dominican Republic, the girls were allowed to return to spend summers with their extended family. Now the daughters are grown. Carla is a child psychologist who believes that being dressed like her sisters when they were young weakened their identities. Sandi is obsessed with her weight, never quite satisfied with her life. Sofia, always a rebel, has just given birth to the first male child in two generations and named him after his grandfather. Yolanda, the primary narrator of the story, contemplates a move back to the Dominican Republic; perhaps there she can shed her uncomfortable identity as the family poet. With humor, grace, and insight, How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents looks back on the lives of the four Garcia sisters and their parents, blending family history and expectations with the realities of their adopted culture.

¡Yo!

From Kirkus Reviews, 11/01/96:
The devilish Garcia girls are back, in a warm, complex, rich and colorful third novel (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991; In the Time of the Butterflies, 1994). The focus is once again on the character of Yo, the oldest and seemingly boldest of the four little girls transplanted from the Dominican Republic to New York in the 1950s, when the upper-class Dominican Garcias fled their home to escape Trujillo's bloody reign. Yo, destined to become an autobiographical poet and novelist, is in trouble with her family when this latest novel begins for having published family secrets--writing about their mother's sneaky methods of scaring her young girls into obeying her, for example, and of their father's enjoyment of skiing naked. But, then, Yo's always been in trouble for telling the truth: When Trujillo was at his most treacherous, Yo's mother remembers, the seven-year-old girl discovered a gun in her father's closet and told a neighbor, a bishop loyal to the government. That led to the family's emigration. This time out the people that Yo, now in her mid-40s and a famous writer, has written about get to tell their side of the story. Her sisters, mother, old-fashioned, gallant father, ex-boyfriends, former professors, best friends, childhood nanny, and Dominican cousins--all remember and reflect on the kind, headstrong, superstitious, needy, fearful, or impulsive Yo they've known at various ages and stages of her life. The voices of Yo's family and friends are magical, and the details of life--first in Dominica, where the Garcias' wealth and social standing made daily life even under the dictatorship seem luxurious and safe, and then in the hard years in New York--are fascinating, though the stories told here are sometimes puzzling and contradictory. Still, the writing, as always, is animated and wonderfully imaginative; the characters jump off the page. A must-read for Alvarez's many fans.
Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Homecoming : New and Collected Poems

Long before her award-winning novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez was writing poetry that gave a distinctive voice to the Latina woman - and helped give to American letters a vibrant new literary form. Homecoming was Alvarez's first published collection of poetry, a work of great subtlety and power in which the young poet returned to her old-world childhood in the Dominican Republic. Now this revised and expanded edition adds thirteen new poems. These more recent writings are still deeply autobiographical in nature, but written with the edgier, more knowing tone of a woman who has seen, and survived, more of life. Wonderfully lucid and engaging, toned with deep emotionality and a wry observation of life, the poems of Julia Alvarez stand next to her fiction to both delight us and give us lessons in living and loving.

The Other Side : El Otro Lado

The acclaimed author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies demonstrates the full range of her extraordinary talents in this new collection of poetry. Alvarez's imaginative integration of Spanish words and Latin rhythms into her poetry, in both sound and sense, memorably reflects her struggle to find and express her true self.