How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Julia Alvarez

Jan 2010 · Sold by Algonquin Books

About this ebook

Named A Great American Novel by The Atlantic!

From the international bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and Afterlife, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents  is "poignant...powerful... Beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory." (The New York Times Book Review)

Don't miss Alvarez’s new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, available now!

Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez’s beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father’s role in an attempt to overthrow brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wondrous but not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways as the girls try find new lives: by straightening their hair and wearing American fashions, and by forgetting their Spanish. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating to be caught between the old world and the new. Here they tell their stories about being at home—and not at home—in America.

"Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review

"A clear-eyed look at the insecurity and yearning for a sense of belonging that are a part of the immigrant experience . . . Movingly told." —The Washington Post Book World
 

Ratings and reviews

I read this my freshman year of college in between classes. It helped clear my mind for the next class afterward. Pretty good thing after some heavy reading. I made the provost's list several times using this technique--and it all started with this book!

Read this book as a freshman and I greatly disliked it. It was bland at parts and wasn't deep. Overall I personally found it boring and confusing

This was a great novel.

About the author

Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her work has garnered wide recognition, including a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, the Woman of the Year by Latina magazine, and inclusion in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling.