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I had high hopes for How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. These hopes continued to grow after reading the two short stories “The Kiss�� and “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story.�� These were both two very well written, expressive, and generally entertaining stories that did well in holding the reader’s attention and delivered strong, powerful endings.

However, as I read on I could not get myself to distinguish between the four Garcia girls: Carla, Sophia, Sandra, and Yolanda. Although some stories were more centered on certain characters, I still found that all of the girls just blended together into one. After reading most of the book I was still unable to tell one girl from the others.

Also, I thought that the sequence of the stories was very hard to follow. The combination of switching between characters and settings makes it hard for the reader to see any link between most of the stories. For example, the story “Trespass,�� a tail of Carla’s run in with a pedophile, is directly followed by “Snow,�� a two page story of Yolanda performing the ‘duck and cover�� drill in school. This leaves the reader with no possible connections between stories. When a man with no pants telling Carla to “C’moninere�� is followed by radioactivity causing “the bones in our arms to go soft�� with no transition between the two, the reader loses the fact that the stories are supposed to be connected. The stories just don’t mix well.

Individually, there are stories that have great merit as I stated earlier. But I feel that as a whole, the book does not do the proper job of personifying every character of the story well enough to satisfy the reader, and it needs to organize the stories or creating some sort of transition between them.