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Chris's Reviews > How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
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it was ok


Personally, I believe “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents� by Julia Alvarez is a pretty weak book. Her inspiration from the book came from real life experiences as she lived in the Dominican Republic the first ten years of her life until she had to flee due to her Father’s participation in a political rebellion. Although this book depicts her real life quite well, I don’t feel Julia does such a great job of getting her true emotions across by jumping from one story to another. Also, I find it hard to separate the characters from one another.

Jumping from story to story in my opinion isn’t as good as one fluent story. For example, I felt tempted to jump around and read “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story� first. “When I went to college, my vivaciousness ultimately worked against me� (87). I feel Alvarez developed her characters well in this story but soon the story was over and I had to readjust to a new setting and story line.

The four girls are four different individuals, but throughout this book I constantly feel I can tell who is who. Sure they are different, but they were brought up in such a way it almost seems like they are one in the same. “Each of the four girls had the same party dress, school clothes, underwear, toothbrush, bedspread, nightgown…� (41). Uniqueness is a sparkling star in the world and that is ripped away from the characters many times in this book. This really agitated me. Although it sets up rebellion and they are different, I would just rather the four girls break apart more than they did.

Although, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents� was not terrible to read by any means and did get a somewhat entertaining story across, I feel the writing style of short stories didn’t portray their stories quite as well as a novel would have. I also believe if the characters were more easily separated from one another this book would have gained.
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Reading Progress

Finished Reading
January 26, 2010 – Shelved

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