Garcia Girls, A Disappointment?

1. What was the author's purpose(s) in writing this book, and how can you tell? How well was this purpose achieved?
• Hint: If your book has an introduction, it's a good place to look for direct clues about the book's intended purpose and good quotes to include in your review.
  For what audience(s) is this book intended, and how can you tell? (In other words, for whom would you recommend this book?)
  1. What are the weaknesses of this book, in your opinion?
  2. How would you describe the author's style of writing? What's your opinion of the style?
  • You must include a passage or two from the text if you choose this question.

How the Garcia Girls Lost their accents by Julia Alvarez is somewhat biographical book written in the form of many short stories and separated into 3 different sections, each talking about a different part of the sister's lives. The book starts out in the most recent part of the character's lives and continues on into the earliest parts. It is about the lives of the 4 sisters, and it talks about how their lives were in American, the Dominican Republic, how immigration had changed their lives, and how growing up as immigrants changed the way that they grew up and developed.


Immigration is a controversial topic. I feel that there were a lot of things in Alvarez’s story that talked about immigration and that there are many aftereffects, good and bad. I feel that this book was intended for everyone to read, but to have different affects on different readers. For example, if a regular person that was born a citizen of the country that they were in, they would have much different feelings about the book than that of an immigrant. A non-immigrant would not be able to relate to many of the things that happen in her book, such as the story of Yolanda, her experience in school, how hard it was to learn and speak English, and how painful it is when other kids make fun of your English and tell you to go back home because you are not “one of them”. An immigrant who has children who have experienced this before or were children themselves when they immigrated and experienced it themselves, then know what it feels like to be excluded because of how they talk, act or look. She could have been informing non-immigrants about how it feels like to be someone that does not belong, how much it hurts inside, and how much it changes a person, for better or worse. She also might have been telling the immigrants that they are not the only ones that face this problem and that there are other people that face the same things as them and that they know how they are feeling so they can comfort them. This sort of makes it more appealing to immigrants, because they can actually relate to the book.

I think that a weakness and a strength of this book is the was that it is written. For example, "A high concrete wall continues for about a quarer of a mile." (Pg 14)  We have no idea why having guards and walls are necessary. "Here she comes, Miss America!" Yolanda clasps her brwo and groans melodramatically as expected." (Pg 4) We have no idea if this is a common occurence in the character's life. We also do not know why the cousin is there and what purpose she serves in advancing the story.This is confusin because we have no background information of the main characters yet. "No, no senorita, Nuesto placer." (Pg 21)We have no idea what the Spanish words mean. Right now, I can assume from the context that it is a statement to deny and payment from being received, but then we do not know why the guards do not want any payment. She wrote this book in a complicated format, where you start reading in the end or most recent part of the character’s lives, but as you read, you slowly go farther and farther into the younger years of the characters. I think that this is a strength because it lets the reader find things out on their own and they can come to their own conclusions of the book with out someone telling them what they have to get from the book and what they have to know. This is also kind of exciting because all of the things are found out by you, so you have a sense of accomplishment from doing things on your own. I feel that this is a weakness however because this may be confusing for some people. Some people may be unused to this kind of writing however, because not a lot of people have read books like this before. This makes it harder for some people to understand, and it may annoy some people. This was true such as when our whole class read it. A lot of the the people in my group did not understand the book, so they did not enjoy reading all of it. This made the book a chore to read, and no one likes to do chores, so we missed a lot of details because we treated it as a chore.

This may have also confused so many people so much that they had no idea what was going on in the book. I for know, know that in the beginning of the book, I had no idea because the structure was so confusing. I was told that the book would get easier to understand the further you went into the book, but while I was reading the first part, I did not understand much. For example, when they were talking about the sister's past, and how their past had affected what they were like in the present, such as how one of the sisters had been kicked out of their home. "But the father kept to his revenge. For months no one could mention the daughter's name in his presence, though he kept calling them all Sophia and quickly corrected himself. When the daughter's baby girl was born, the mother put her foot down." (Pg.32) The girl had wanted to make things up with their father, but I had no idea what she wanted to make up to him, because I did not know what had happened, all I knew was that their father was angry at her and did not want to see her again, I found out later in the middle part of the book that their father was angry at her because she had fallen in love with a foreign man that their father did not know and did not approve of, so he threw her out. I feel that the structure makes it satisfying when you read along, because it gives more and more details to what had happened in the past the further you read, which is a good thing about the structure of the book. It is so confusing in the beginning of the book, because the beginning of the book is the conclusion of her life, which makes it seem like the conclusion of the book, people may give up reading the book after a couple of pages or chapter.

I began to want to stop reading the book because I did not understand what was going on, who the characters were, and what the story was about. However, since I had to keep going on and on, I eventually found out the good points of the book, and that was exciting and made it satisfying to keep reading and to finish the book. The end of the book was also interesting because it summed up the entire book after talking about the beginning of the girls's lives. It made the book seem as if it were a cycle, that it was never ending. This was as interesting book, it may have annoyed people to read it, and it may have made some people angry, but it was a satisfactory read, and I am glad that I read it.