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How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez is a beautiful book written with lyrical and descriptive prose. This fictional novel of four sisters is said to be a very autobiographical account of Alvarez's early childhood in the Dominican Republic and later emigrating to New York when they are forced to flee the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. This is a delightful and gripping tale of the four Garcia sisters - Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia - told in alternating chapters by each sister and in reverse chronological order. The book is divided into three parts, the first part focusing on the adult lives of the sisters between 1989 and 1972. The second section of the book from 1970 and 1960 tells the struggles of their immigration experience in the United States, while the last section between 1960 and 1956 in the Dominican Republic where their father becomes involved in a plot to remove Trujillo from power and its attendant consequences. This is a study in the immigrant experience for young children and their parents in coming to such a different culture and country and the struggles to assimilate into that new culture. I am working my way through the works of Julia Alvarez and enjoying the experience since I am drawn to books portraying the Latin American culture.

"The late sun sifts through the bougainvillea trained to climb the walls of the patio, to thread across the trellis roof, to pour down magenta and purple blossoms."

"All around her are the foothills, a dark enormous green, the sky more a brightness than a color. A breeze blows through the palms below, rustling their branches, so they whisper like voices. Here and there a braid of smoke rises up from a hillside--a campesino and his family living out their solitary life. This is what she has been missing all of these years without really knowing she has been missing it. Standing here in the quiet, she believes she has never felt at home in the States, never."

"I would never find someone who would understand the peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles."

"I grew up, a curious woman, a woman of story ghosts and story devils, a woman prone to bad dreams and bad insomnia. There are still times I wake up three o'clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art."